Activists Say Broadband Plan Needs Benchmarks to Reach Goals
The FCC should write a bold National Broadband Plan with a clear vision and policies that can ensure wider broadband access, adoption and competition, public-interest groups said Wednesday during a briefing on Capitol Hill. Speakers from the Consumer Federation of America, Free Press, Consumers Union and other organizations praised FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s goal of offering 100 million homes 100 Mbps Internet access by 2020, to give the U.S. the world’s largest market of ultra-broadband users.
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The groups have jointly filed hundreds of proposals and recommendations for the broadband plan, said Public Knowledge Legal Director Harold Feld. “We felt it was important as the plan is being finalized to come together around a few concrete recommendations.”
“This is more about vision than anything else,” said CFA Research Director Mark Cooper. “This is about establishing a framework for which policies will be implemented going forward.”
Speakers proposed benchmarks that they called needed to achieve the FCC’s goals for the plan. The commission should declare broadband eligible for Universal Services Fund support, Cooper said. “This will trigger a major series of proceedings that will take time,” and “because it takes time, it’s important to start now, put it in the broadband plan, put urgency in the plan, and put the weight of it behind,” so “we can begin after a decade of doing nothing,” he said.
The need to increase competition was a major theme. Competition between cable operators and phone companies has pushed technology further and prompted technology upgrades, Feld said. “This has all been very good, but it is not enough. It is not getting us where we need to go.” We need “benchmarks for real competition of multiple providers and markets with real consequences and real plans for what happens if that competition does not emerge,” he said. Feld said the FCC needs to make more unlicensed spectrum available. Verizon Wireless and AT&T are likely to dominate spectrum sales, he said. “This is where the government really needs to step in and ensure that any new spectrum auctions help to foster competition in the wireless market.”
Critics reply that some of the public-interest groups’ positions, such as on special access, would hurt competition. Requiring incumbents to share their facilities at regulated rates to increase competition is “completely misplaced,” said Free State Foundation President Randolph May. Any new competition “that isn’t facilities-based isn’t really sustainable,” he said. “It depends ultimately on the FCC maintaining a regulated sharing regime into perpetuity.” And antitrust authorities, not the commission, should decide which companies can take part in spectrum auctions, May said.
Free Press Policy Director Ben Scott made a plea for better transparency, to help consumers make better choices. The commission reported last fall that “up to 80 percent of the time, subscribers have broadband speeds that are slower than were advertised to them when they signed on for the service,” he said. The FCC should “waste no time in establishing new rules that protect subscribers against price gouging, unfair billing practices, exorbitant early termination fees” and other abuses, Scott said.
Speakers also called for other open access requirements and for enhanced broadband-data-collection standards. “In each of these areas we're not asking for that much,” Cooper said. “We just want vision and a path that we're starting on,” and to “declare the direction in which we're going to launch this and start down the right path.”