Parts of Broadband Plan Circulated at the FCC
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski circulated parts of the National Broadband Plan to the other commissioner offices Tuesday. Commissioners still don’t have a full text of the plan, but sections are supposed to be circulated as they're completed by staff, we learned. Meanwhile, Genachowski continued a series of speeches on broadband Tuesday, formally releasing the results of a new survey on “Broadband Adoption and Use in America” that’s expected to get prominent mention in the plan. But industry groups warned the agency that reclassifying broadband as a Title II service, subject to stricter regulation, a proposal reportedly under consideration at the FCC, would push money away from investment in broadband lines.
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“Broadband is important because it’s a platform for solutions, a platform for helping solve some of the most essential challenges we face as a country -- education, health care, energy, public safety,” Genachowski said during a speech at the Brookings Institution. “Why do we need a national broadband plan? We need a plan for our country to compete globally in the 21st Century. We need a plan for our people to have real opportunities.”
Genachowski broke little new ground. He said the National Broadband Plan would include a recommendations for a “once in a generation transformation” of the Universal Service Fund. “We need to transform it to support broadband. This won’t be easy, but we're going to lay out a plan to accomplish that.” The chairman is scheduled to speak again Wednesday on broadband. He didn’t take questions from the press, leaving through a side door and bypassing a group of waiting reporters.
The FCC released a working paper based on a survey of 5,005 Americans at the event, which said 80 million adults and 13 million children over the age of five don’t have high- speed Internet at home. One of the biggest reasons they don’t is cost, the paper said. Thirty-six percent of non- adopters list cost as their biggest objection. The average price paid by those with broadband service was $41 per month, the FCC found. Non-adopters who answered the question, said they would pay $25 per month, but not more.
The survey also found that 22 percent of non-adopters said they don’t have home broadband because they lack the skills to use broadband. Also, 19 percent of non-adopters said they don’t have broadband because they see the Internet as a waste of time, or because they're dial-up users content with their current service -- http://xrl.us/bgwqsr.
As work on the broadband plan enters the homestretch, major wireline and wireless trade associations, joined by the NCTA, Verizon, AT&T, Qwest and Time Warner Cable, sent Genachowski a letter warning against reclassifying broadband as a Title II service, a move that has gotten some consideration at the FCC (CD Jan 21 p1). “The proposed regulatory about-face would be untenable as a legal matter and, at a minimum, would plunge the industry into years of litigation and regulatory chaos,” the letter said. “And it would threaten to extend common carrier regulation not just to broadband Internet access providers, but to huge swaths of the Internet at large, betraying decades of bipartisan support for keeping the Internet unregulated.”
Broadband providers have already invested hundreds of billions of dollars to deploy next-generation networks, $60 billion in 2009 alone, they said: “These substantial investments, made in reliance on the Commission’s Title I classification decisions, have resulted in the deployment of increasingly robust networks and the emergence of new competitive options from every segment of the industry.”
“I agree it is difficult to imagine a proposal more at odds with the FCC’s historical commitment to keeping the Internet unregulated and with hopes for economic recovery and job creation,” Free State Foundation President Randolph May said, commenting on the letter. Scott Cleland, chairman of NetCompetition.org, said the letter was “one of the best, most strongly-worded and serious letters to the FCC that I have read in my 18 years following FCC issues.”
Free Press disputed the arguments. “No amount of hysterical rhetoric from corporate lobbyists should stop the Federal Communications Commission from considering how it can best serve the public under the law,” the group said. “In another demonstration of corporate hubris and political bluster, the telephone and cable lobby is telling the Federal Communications Commission that the sky will fall if the agency implements policies that will help bring broadband to all.”