State Regulators Lobbying Hill to Prevent ICC Preemption
State regulators are taking their case against preemption in intercarrier compensation regime reform to the Hill, telecom lobbyists and a NARUC official told us Monday. The FCC is weighing reform proposals from incumbents that would preempt state rates and lower them to $0.0007 per minute -- the so-called “triple-zero” option -- within five years for price cap companies and eight years for rate-of-return companies. State officials, having endorsed the FCC’s reform process, are now meeting with legislators, hoping to stall preemption, said telecom lobbyists and NARUC Legislative Director Brian O'Hara.
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NARUC has and will continue meeting with consumer advocates, the FCC and states before the October meeting, O'Hara said in an email Monday. “We've also asked our members who have concerns with the ABC plan to reach out to their congressional delegations and governors, et cetera. State commissions and consumer groups believe the ABC plan raises more questions than it answers, and the goal is to alert Congress about these concerns,” he said.
State regulators are in something of a bind because they signed off on FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s reform process early on (CD May 31 p7). In April, Nebraska state commissioner Ann Boyle implored industry to accept compromise. “I pray that everybody will say, ‘I may not like all of it, but we like most of it,'” she said at an FCC roundtable in Nebraska. “And don’t go running to Congress to say, ‘We want you to intervene.’ Our country deserves to have this done” (CD May 19 p7).
It’s not clear how much success the states have had in their lobbying so far. One telecom lobbyist told us, though, that their case has gotten the most sympathy from states’ rights conservatives, the lobbyist said.
Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission member James Cawley reached out to the Pennsylvania delegation, he said during a webinar by the National Regulatory Research Institute Monday. (See separate story in this issue.) After realizing the potential impact of adopting the ABC Plan on the rural economy, one legislator backed off from supporting the plan, he said. Meanwhile, USTelecom filed its proposed rules on ICC revamp late Monday.
FCC staffers are working in the hopes of getting an order done by Thursday so it can be voted on at this month’s open meeting. Some sectors of industry are lobbying against the ABC plan’s intercarrier compensation reforms, too, but for different reasons. A white paper released Monday, sponsored by Google, Skype, Sprint Nextel and Vonage, urged the FCC to reject suggestions that VoIP be assessed under the intercarrier regime. “Expanding these rate regulations, designed over thirty years ago, to modern networks and services would violate the FCC’s statutory mandates to promote broadband adoption and to avoid burdening innovative services with regulation and would harm consumer welfare,” the white paper said (http://xrl.us/bme8vd).
HyperCube joined CompTel, among others, in urging the commission to require IP interconnection under Section 251(a) of the Telecom Act, according to an ex parte notice released Monday (http://xrl.us/bme8vy). HyperCube argued that “such a mandate is feasible today, when, among other things, use of competitive tandem providers such as HyperCube permits interconnection between TDM and IP-based service providers, whether or not both use the same protocol,” according to the notice.
The incumbents, meanwhile, have said in ex parte meetings that they might compromise on the right-of-first-refusal, but Verizon is dug in on the question of compensation. All “VoIP services are interstate services subject to exclusive federal jurisdiction as well as the need to ensure that demand for these innovative new services is not depressed by legacy intrastate access charges,” Verizon Senior Vice President Kathleen Grillo told commission staff in meetings last week, according to an ex parte posted Monday (http://xrl.us/bme8yn). Incumbents have said in their lobbying meetings that preserving disparate state rates will allow arbitrage to continue, several telecom lobbyists told us.