The FCC should move quickly to reclassify Internet access under Title...

to move forward on the National Broadband Plan, Free Press said. Seconding the motion was former Obama telecom adviser Susan Crawford, who said the controversy over net neutrality “is a subset” of the issue of a need for reclassification. “To take a Title I approach in this context is to do a ‘once more, with feeling'” approach that has already failed with the Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in the Comcast case, she said. “The only sustainable path is to re-label these services as telecommunications.” The public and industry “should not lose sight of the outstanding threshold question of why the FCC would disrupt good broadband Internet access policy that has worked well to date,” said Vice President Joshua Seidemann of the Independent Telephone and Telecommunications Alliance, which opposes reclassification. Despite Free Press’s assurances that reclassification doesn’t concern regulating the Internet, many in the industry are worried that reclassification is “a Trojan Horse,” Seidemann said. “Title I has been invoked successfully to address a variety of ’social’ issues, including CPNI, access by persons with disabilities, and E911,” he said. “The FCC should avoid attempts to impose broad overreach where that sort of involvement is not only not necessary, but has been predicted to portend negative impacts on investment.” USTelecom Senior Vice President Jonathan Banks said Free Press’s reasoning “flies in the face of respected legal opinion.” He said by e-mail, “There is no clear case that further Internet rules would benefit consumers, job creation or innovation, as regulators in both the European Union and the United Kingdom have recently recognized.”