Reclassification Talks Show Some Common Ground on Wireline
Accord is slightly closer on how wireline ISPs should handle all Internet content and manage real-time communications and streaming services that don’t work properly with latency, officials on both sides of the issue said Monday. A meeting Saturday involving FCC Chief of Staff Eddie Lazarus (CD July 30 p1) didn’t produce breakthroughs, they said. The meeting did show that supporters and opponents of net neutrality still have more common ground on the wireline issues of content nondiscrimination and managed services than on wireless, said commission and industry officials.
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There’s still much less agreement on wireless issues, as has been the case at other private meetings attended by Lazarus, industry officials said. “The real issue is wireless,” said an industry lobbyist who’s watching the talks but not participating. But no deal on wireline net neutrality seems imminent, said commission and industry officials. A goal of the talks could be to codify in a statement of principles the points of agreement and seek congressional action to embody them in legislation, said commission and industry officials. For now, Lazarus and other key Genachowski aides attending the meetings haven’t been discussing the progress with commissioners and their staff, FCC officials said. A commission spokeswoman declined to comment on the meeting.
Further talks are scheduled Wednesday and Thursday at the commission, industry and commission officials said. The same players who attended the Saturday gatherings and others last week likely will attend, they said. The business representatives taking part Saturday were Richard Whitt of Google, Chris Libertelli of Skype, Tom Tauke of Verizon, Jim Cicconi of AT&T, Kyle McSlarrow of NCTA and Markham Erickson of the Open Internet Coalition, said an ex parte filing, http://xrl.us/bhuzzj. The subjects discussed, including applying the principles to wireless, were the same as at earlier meetings. Representatives of AT&T, NCTA, the Open Internet Coalition and Verizon had no further comment.
McSlarrow of NCTA remains optimistic that agreement can be reached, perhaps because he doesn’t represent wireless carriers that remain at odds with net neutrality supporters, industry officials said. Any agreement reached in the meetings probably would be made public at some point, though details about how haven’t been discussed, they said. The sides have recently come closer together on what managed services are, on language to ban discrimination based on content, and on the FCC’s role in a new framework, but full agreement isn’t close, said an official who supports net neutrality and is monitoring the meetings. He heard no progress was made at Saturday’s gathering.
"Of great concern to many distributed computing industry participants and observers is the implication” from the meetings that ISPs would be prohibited from blocking lawful content, said CEO Marty Lafferty of the Distributed Computing Industry Association. That would imply “a problematic new regime that would mandate the monitoring of online content to determine whether particular instances of usage were authorized, and then filtering it accordingly,” he said Saturday in a weekly message to members. “This is an area which first needs to be addressed with new business models for content replication and distribution to take advantage of new technologies"
The sides seemed “quite far apart” on nondiscrimination of content heading into Saturday’s meeting, said Senior Vice President Andrew Schwartzman of the Media Access Project, which supports net neutrality. Schwartzman hasn’t been fully briefed on the meeting. “With respect to wireless, there is just a really fundamental disagreement,” he said. “People on our end regard this as just the centerpiece of what the commission needs to do with reclassification, because this is where all the future problems will lie,” and “the carriers seem to have dug in their heels. There’s a really fundamental disagreement here.”