FTC ‘Well Suited’ to Handle Net Neutrality, Commissioner Wright Says
The FTC is “particularly well-suited” to have jurisdiction over net neutrality due to its experience in analyzing cases of vertical integration, FTC Commissioner Joshua Wright said during a Monday panel at the Technology Policy Institute’s Aspen Forum. “It’s what the FTC does every day when we look at vertical cases.” The agency’s “rule-of-reason analysis is a much better framework … than other alternatives I've seen discussed in this debate,” he said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
Net neutrality issues are not the kind of “conduct in the world for which you want categorical prohibitions,” Wright said. Instead, policy should be determined on a case-by-case basis to determine if business practices are “depriv[ing] consumers the benefits” of a competitive market, he said. The FTC has “enough in its toolbox” to determine when consumers are being harmed and what remedies would be best to fix that harmful behavior, he said. Wright declined to predict the outcome of Verizon v. FCC, a net neutrality case set to be heard later this year at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. “I suspect that the FTC staff and its lawyers and the commission as a whole would do its job, if the job were given to us,” he said.
Rules surrounding net neutrality are “really fuzzy here, so we're not sure what we can do,” said Kevin Leddy, executive vice president-corporate strategy at Time Warner Cable. The idea that content providers could subsidize data use -- as ESPN reportedly is attempting to do -- is “something we ought to be able to experiment with,” but it’s not clear how or if that violates the net neutrality rules, he said. Uncertainty on net neutrality rules is not preventing Time Warner Cable from implementing any major initiatives, he said. “I don’t think it will change things very much” if the rule is struck down, he said. “I think we might experiment a little more."
Consumers are going to demand content-carrier partnerships like the one reportedly being sought by ESPN, “particularly as we get into the more bandwidth-intensive applications, like video,” said Robert Quinn, senior vice president-federal regulatory at AT&T. That kind of partnership seems “totally consistent with the wireless rules that exist at the [communications] commission,” he said.
Broadband prices will increase as the prices of video and voice services go down, Leddy said. “As the video business becomes less profitable … the burden on the broadband business has to be greater.” Though network-use charges are based on the cost of use at peak, it is fair to charge for total consumption, because “charging for total consumption actually is a proxy for charging consumption at peak,” he said. “Heavy consumers are heavy consumers at peak.”