FCC

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, April 20, 2017, Contact:  Scott Cleland 703-217-2407

Pai FCC is wisely spurring private broadband infrastructure investment and facilities-based competition, which is what makes America’s Internet infrastructure unique in the world, and which is the opposite of the Wheeler FCC’s broadband infrastructure policy of Title II public utility regulation and promotion of taxpayer-funded municipal broadband networks

WASHINGTON D.C. – The following may be attributed to Scott Cleland, Chairman of NetCompetition:

“In a series of consistent digital infrastructure decisions today by the Pai FCC, the important policy takeaway is a Pai-FCC laser focus on encouraging private sector infrastructure investment and facilities-based competition, a complete reversal of the Wheeler-FCC’s opposite laser focus of discouraging private broadband infrastructure investment via aggressive promotion of taxpayer-funded, municipal broadband infrastructure investment, and maximal Title II public utility regulation of competitive broadband facility providers.”

“These Pai-FCC infrastructure decisions today represent a clear return to the bipartisan 1996 Telecom Act purpose of “promoting competition and reducing regulation,” and the consistent bipartisan broadband policies of the 1997-2013 FCC’s of Senate-confirmed FCC Chairmen Kennard, Powell, Martin, and Genachowski, that all promoted facilities-based broadband competition and investment, and consistently rejected Title II utility regulation of broadband Internet access.”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, March 23, 2017, Contact:  Scott Cleland 703-217-2407

Public Knowledge/Big Internet Oppose FCC Business Data Services Deregulation Because They Want More Unnecessary Title II Utility, Price Regulated Resale Subsidies Instead of Facilities-Based Competition & New Fiber and Fixed Wireless/5G Broadband Investment

WASHINGTON D.C. – The following may be attributed to Scott Cleland, Chairman of NetCompetition:

“This Thursday, the FCC will vote on its Business Data Services Order and is expected to finally deregulate broadband prices for the business market, a decade after the FCC fully deregulated broadband prices for the consumer market. Thus, this FCC BDS order is all about the future of facilities-based broadband competition and transitioning away from Title II, price-regulation-dependent, resale competition.”  

“Kudos to Chairman Pai and Commissioner O’Rielly’s vision for promoting more facilities-based broadband competition to replace slow, pre-1996, legacy copper facilities with modern fiber optic or gigabit fixed wireless facilities, to promote infrastructure investment, economic growth and job creation.”

“Twenty years after the 1996 Telecom Act promoted competition over regulation, and now that the cost of deploying gigabit speed, fixed wireless, broadband facilities over the last 500 to 2000 feet has fallen precipitously in the last few years, it is high time that for-profit corporations providing broadband data services to the business market, get off the FCC price regulation dole and individually, or as a private consortia, build their own competitive broadband facilities.”

At best the notions of net neutrality and consumer privacy are somewhat in tension.

At worst, they are in opposition, and harm consumer privacy as happened when the Wheeler-FCC subordinated the goal of what’s best for consumer privacy to the conflicting and overriding goal of what was best for imposing maximal, Title II net neutrality.

Net neutrality and consumer privacy are in tension because they are very different concepts, priorities, and approaches for the handling of information online.

However, the original tension between the FCC’s first concept of net neutrality and consumer privacy was very limited because the Martin-FCC’s 2005 Internet Policy Statement on net neutrality was an extension of the Powell-FCC’s “Internet Freedoms” concept of net neutrality, and both approaches were consumer-first, i.e. very clearly centered around what consumers could expect from the Internet.

What thrust them into the more opposing concepts that they are today?

It was when net neutrality flipped from being primarily a consumer-centric principle to an edge-provider centric principle defined by Google, Amazon, Facebook and Netflix; and from the enforcement of a general broadband nondiscrimination principle, to the preemptive imposition of “the strongest possible,” specific, utility rate regulation framework – i.e. Title II of the 1934 Communications Act -- on a competitive industry that had done nothing wrong to warrant it.

Please see PBS NewsHour’s five minute segment here with Gigi Sohn and I discussing Congress’ rescission of the FCC’s unimplemented broadband privacy order that the Wheeler-FCC majority passed last October by a 3-2 vote.

Please see my latest The Hill op-ed: “Congress was right to save consumers from privacy rules imposed under net neutrality.”

Consumer privacy has been the biggest loser from net neutrality proponents’ politicization of privacy.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, March 23, 2017, Contact:  Scott Cleland 703-217-2407

FCC Chairman Pai’s Proposal to Deregulate Competitive Business Data Services Will Accelerate Private Investment and Deployment of Fiber & 5G Gigabit Mobile Broadband      

WASHINGTON D.C. – The following may be attributed to Scott Cleland, Chairman of NetCompetition:

“Kudos to FCC Chairman Pai for clearly understanding the business, economic, and investment, realities and challenges, of multi-billion dollar private investments in infrastructure; and purposefully organizing the FCC to better encourage broadband infrastructure deployment quickly to be part of the solution to America’s economic growth and job creation needs.

“Chairman Pai knows one of the best ways for the FCC to promote private investment in infrastructure and advance 5G broadband innovation is to encourage facilities-based broadband competition in the business market, by permanently stopping FCC rate regulation of the long, fully-competitive, fiber-based, business data market, and ending most all FCC rate regulation of the antiquated copper-based business data market, except in the minority of counties or areas where there still may be insufficient competition.”

“Let the investing, building, and deploying of the Nation’s next generation, fiber and 5G broadband networks begin -- soonest!”

NETCompetition.org is a pro-competition e-forum representing broadband interests.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, March 23, 2017, Contact:  Scott Cleland 703-217-2407

Senate CRA Vote Rescinding FCC’s Broadband Privacy Order Paves Way for House Passage and Has Congress Prioritizing Consumer Privacy Protection Over Net Neutrality

WASHINGTON D.C. – The following may be attributed to Scott Cleland, Chairman of NetCompetition:

 “The CRA was made for correcting big agency mistakes just like the FCC’s Broadband Privacy Order, which made consumer privacy protection worse not better, because it prioritized technology over people, net neutrality over consumer privacy protection, the FCC over the FTC, and the interests of edge platforms over the interests of American consumers.”

“The most embarrassing part of the FCC’s broadband privacy order is that it does not really protect consumers’ privacy at all. That’s because effectively it only requires ISPs to keep certain information private when every other entity on the Internet does not have to keep private that exact same information.”

Please see my The Hill op-ed on: “Consumer privacy is more important than net neutrality.”

Please don’t miss my latest The Hill op-ed: “Pai’s FCC is rebooting broadband facilities competition and 5G investment.”

It uncovers what is important underneath the focus on Title II net neutrality.

New Trump FCC Chair Ajit Pai’s keynote speech on “Building the 5G Economy” at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today spotlighted to the communications world that the U.S. FCC is going in a very different policy direction than that of the previous FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, who just happens to be speaking at the same event as a private citizen to a break-out session on “The Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

The fact that they are both at the largest communications event in the world delivering starkly divergent messages and visions, on the same day, provides an instructive and illuminating opportunity to juxtapose their contrasting policy approaches.