Don’t Expect Senate Action on Communications Act Overhaul, Pryor Tells NARUC

"We don’t have any plans to do that on the Senate side,” Pryor said. “I doubt we do anything this year because we're working on STELA [Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act] and a few other things.”

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., “agrees with Senator Pryor -- no one is seriously talking about moving a full ’telecom rewrite’ this year,” a committee spokesman told us.

The Senate will “see what [House Commerce lawmakers] want to do” and talk to various stakeholders, Pryor said, saying “it’s always good to keep that possibility open, of rewriting telecom.” He judged the House initiative to be in a “very early, preliminary stage” and not anything warranting Senate action on the horizon. “You can’t argue that [the Telecom Act of 1996 is] a real driver in the U.S. economy,” Pryor said.

Senate Republicans, however, want to start revisiting the act, as House Republicans are doing. “Yesterday, [FCC Chairman Tom] Wheeler said that a debate on updating the Communications Act is both ‘warranted and necessary,'” Communications Subcommittee ranking member Roger Wicker, R-Miss., told us in a statement. “I agree. It is my hope that the Committee will engage on the important issues surrounding the Act, as our colleagues in the House are doing.”

At last month’s State of the Net conference, Senate Commerce ranking member John Thune, R-S.D., stressed how much has changed since the Telecom Act of 1996 was signed into law. “Many folks, nonetheless, want to apply archaic telephone regulations to the digital ecosystem, and that is the crux of the policy debate that we're having here in Washington, D.C.,” Thune said. “I honestly do not understand how anyone believes that laws designed for Ma Bell in the 1930s are appropriate for the Internet today. While there are fundamental goals that need to be preserved -- such as universal service and public safety -- as policymakers, we need to be open-minded about how to achieve those goals in the future without being bound by the strictures of the past.” He cited “obsolete” laws and regulations that should be scrapped.

Three Republicans on Senate Commerce want a Communications Act overhaul that gets rid of “needless” regulation, they said in a joint op-ed for The Hill earlier this month. Sens. Dean Heller of Nevada, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire signed the piece (http://bit.ly/1lB613u).

STELA, Other Priorities

Pryor’s remarks emphasized his focus on data breaches, wireless 911 location accuracy standards and updates to the E-rate program. Pryor recently introduced what he called a “smart, common-sense” data security bill with Rockefeller and Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Bill Nelson, D-Fla., he pointed out. Data breaches have been “a huge thing,” Pryor said, citing the recent Target data breach and ones affecting Neiman Marcus and other companies. “That can happen to any of those companies, and it has,” Pryor said. “It’s just a fact of life right now.” He said it’s fine for companies to collect personal data of consumers as long as they safeguard it. His legislation “has a real chance of passage” due to a surging “sense of urgency” in Congress, Pryor predicted. “Privacy has always been a bipartisan issue on the Hill,” committee Democratic Senior Counsel John Branscome said during a later NARUC panel, pointing to promising prospects for this legislation.

Pryor strongly backs the FCC and President Barack Obama in their move to revamp E-rate and provide faster broadband speeds to schools. E-rate “can be a lot better,” Pryor said. “We need to allocate more resources to it.” He’s also “keeping tabs” on the broadcast incentive spectrum auction, he said, also pointing to the IP transition as a major focus.

"We need to pass it this year,” Pryor said of reauthorizing STELA, which expires at the end of 2014. There are “already discussions between the House and the Senate,” Pryor observed, “to make sure we do this the right way. ... The Senate is starting, the House is starting.” Pryor is “hopeful” Congress will be able to put together a STELA draft “all can agree on,” he said. In the House, Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., has committed to producing a draft of a STELA bill by the end of the first quarter.

Senate Commerce sees “opportunities to enact real changes this year to improve consumer choice and competition, like those in Senator Rockefeller’s Consumer Choice in Online Video Act,” the committee spokesman said. The committee “is going to work on reauthorizing STELA this year.” The House “will likely end up moving first in this space,” Ray Baum, senior policy adviser to Walden, told the NARUC telecom committee during a separate panel Tuesday. House Republican committee leaders are trying to “keep STELA on a narrow footing,” he said. Rockefeller plans to work closely with Thune and the Senate Judiciary Committee in a “deliberative approach,” figuring out the scope of reauthorization, Branscome said.

House Commerce plans to dig into what it continues to call a Communications Act update rather than a rewrite, Baum said. The phrasing conveys “how big a bite you want to take” in overhauling the act, Baum said. He said the 1996 act had a lot of principles, such as those related to people with disabilities, that “have to be melded into the Internet world.” He questioned Title II regulations “built in the era of monopolies” and whether they should apply to a broadband technology era.

"This will be an effort by forward-thinking legislators in the House and Senate to produce an updated law that drives our economy and spurs the breakthrough innovations that have made our country a global leader in communications,” said Walden in a statement when asked about Pryor’s comments. “I look forward to joining with other legislators who share our vision for growth and jobs in the pursuit of updated laws that keep pace with technology.”

"It’s going to be an update, in our view,” Baum said, promising more white papers on “how to handle things like interconnection and spectrum and Universal Service Fund and role of the states. The list goes on and on.”