Pai Seeks Quicker Action and Regulatory Certainty
Legacy regulations developed to contend with monopoly copper providers have no place in today’s world of next-generation networks and “intermodal competition” among cable, carriers and telcos, FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai said. He said the commission could help the U.S. regain its leadership in the information, communications and telecom sector by doing three things: Act more quickly, get more spectrum into the commercial market and remove barriers to infrastructure investment. Companies have told Pai they are “sitting on billions of dollars on their balance sheets, in part because of regulatory uncertainty,” he said on C-SPAN. Those companies will be more hesitant to invest in fiber deployment or Internet infrastructure until the rules are “certain and predictable,” Pai said: The FCC’s regulatory framework should “give them the incentive to take those risks."
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Pai was skeptical of the continued need for a ban on exclusive contracts between cable operators and the networks they own (CD Sept 17 p2). With the program access exclusivity ban scheduled to expire Friday, the FCC needs to look at whether the ban is still necessary, taking into account the current state of the marketplace as Congress intended, he said. “I think there is a general consensus” that “competition in this area has changed compared to where it was in 1992,” he said.
The commission needs to take a “forward-thinking approach,” and consider a more “technologically neutral, less regulatory way of thinking,” Pai said in a pretaped episode of The Communicators to be shown on the cable network this weekend. Regulators shouldn’t think about fiber deployment in the same way as they regulated copper monopolies in the past and should think about them as existing in a competitive marketplace, he said. Pai spoke positively of a recent California bill to ensure that VoIP remains unregulated for the next eight years (CD Oct 2 p9).
Pai wants the commission to close the Title II docket, which was set up to consider reclassifying Internet services as telecom services subject to common carrier regulations. That would “let the private sector know that reclassification of Internet services as and other services as telecom services under Title II would be off the table, but we haven’t done that,” he said. “It’s a very simple, symbolic step, but it could go a long way toward sending the right message."
Pai doesn’t want the FCC to “artificially limit” who can buy licenses in the incentive auction of broadcast spectrum. The commission’s goal should be that spectrum is put to the “highest value use” -- which, in the current environment, is typically measured by who is the highest bidder, he said. The commission shouldn’t set limits on how much spectrum a provider can hold in a certain market without basing it on “particular facts” about “competitive realities” the market, he said. Otherwise, the agency “could unintendedly limit how robust the spectrum auction could be,” he said. As the FCC sets rules for the voluntary incentive auction of TV station frequencies, it needs to take into account broadcasters’ concerns about how the repacking process would work, how they should think about valuation of the spectrum they hold and what guidelines they should think about when it comes to channel sharing, Pai said. Although TV broadcast spectrum is a “critical part” of the puzzle, it’s not the only part, he said.
The commission should “think creatively” about ways to get federal users off spectrum they're assigned when they're unable or unwilling to move, Pai said. “I'm not opposed to innovative sharing strategies.” The FCC could take action in other bands, like AWS-4 or wireless communications service spectrum, he said, urging an “all-of-the-above approach.” The commission’s principal goal should be to “clear and reallocate” the spectrum, he said. Companies can make much more advanced plans about how to use the spectrum if they have an “unencumbered property right” to it, he said.
Pai said he will push for deadlines for acting on petitions for reconsideration or applications for a review, and to approve mergers and acquisitions within 180 days. He also wants to enforce Section VII of the Communications Act -- “one of the forgotten sections” -- which tells the commission to act on a proposal for a new technology or service within one year of its proposal. “That would really send a strong message to the private sector that we want to work with you,” he said. The full interview will be on C-SPAN Saturday at 6:30 pm EST, and again Monday.