FTC Seen Likely to Take Hard Line on Deep Packet Inspection
LAKE GRAPEVINE, Texas -- The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will take a hard line on deep packet inspection (DPI), online and telecom lawyer Ron Del Sesto of Bingham McCutchen told a CompTel audience Tuesday. Even harsh restrictions on the practice may well “open an industry that nobody’s willing to touch” because there will be some needed regulatory clarity, he told us after his panel.
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The vitriol generated by an inquiry from Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., into DPI has emboldened the FTC to take a strong stance, Del Sesto said. “Right now, everybody’s pretty scared to get into DPI because of what happened with Markey’s inquiry,” he told us. If the FTC adopts strict regulations, industry will be more likely to engage, he said: “At least there'll be some rules of the road."
Privacy regulations also came up in a late Monday panel. Sprint Vice President of Government Relations Bill Barloon and Cormac Group founding partner Pat Williams agreed that the next Congress will take up privacy laws regardless of which party wins this fall’s elections.
The FCC’s 2007 rules on customer proprietary network information, while arduous, had worked well, panelists said Tuesday. The rules changed relationships among companies and their third-party providers, as “we can train a lot within Covad but it’s also incumbent on us to make sure our … partners understand the requirements as well,” said Katherine Mudge, Covad director of state affairs and ILEC relations. Rules also changed relations between companies and ordinary consumers. “I do think it trickled down to the consumer. It almost became a buzz-word,” Mudge said: “They became aware of, ‘well I've got rights’ and they'd say, ‘well, CPNI,’ without really knowing what that was. That put a burden back on our company to make sure we could respond."
Panelists also expressed concerns over new Massachusetts data protection laws that require encryption of any personal data of any resident of the commonwealth. The question quickly became whether other states would follow Massachusetts and whether or not there should be “uniformity.” Mudge and Sherry Ramsey, AT&T assistant vice president of public policy, stopped short of calling for national regulation, but did lament what Ramsey called “a patchwork” approach.