FCC Chooses ‘Third Way’ for Classifying Broadband Providers
The move comes following an April judgment by a federal court concerning the FCC's authority over Comcast as an Internet provider. The ruling found that the agency had much more limited authority under current classification of Net providers as "information services," than had been widely assumed.
In his statement, Genachowski said he rejected two "extreme alternatives" in the wake of the Comcast decision.
Those alternatives, he said, were to continue relying on the FCC's limited "ancillary" authority as specified by the court, or fully reclassifying Internet communications as a "telecommunications service." He said he had reservations about both approaches, because the limited authority route faced a continual and "serious risk of failure in court," while the full reclassification route included measures that, if applied to broadband, could damage the relatively unregulated nature of the Net.
But, he added, "it is widely accepted that the FCC needs backstop authority to prevent" companies from "restricting lawful innovation or speech, or engaging in unfair practices." Restriction of content by broadband providers is the core of the fight over Net Neutrality.
The FCC chairman said he was seeking what he called "a third way," which would recognize only the transmission component of broadband access service as a telecommunications service, and would not apply other telecommunications services sections that are "unnecessary and inappropriate" to broadband. Among other advantages, he said, was that this approach was comparable to how Congress had instructed the FCC to classify wireless services.
If the partial reclassification is successful, it could change the stage...
