Genachowski Promises Sharp Look at Cell-Cutoff Policies Like BART’s
The FCC will soon open a proceeding taking off from BART’s adoption of a policy for cutoffs of wireless service, a commission official said Friday. The Wireless and Public Safety bureaus and the general counsel have been involved in the issue and will continue to be, the official said in an interview. He wouldn’t specify the nature of the proceeding or when the notice might be issued. And he wouldn’t say whether it would wrap in the handling of petitions that have challenged a shutdown by BART in August, before it had a policy.
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"The legal and policy issues raised by the type of wireless service interruption at issue here are significant and complex,” Chairman Julius Genachowski said late Thursday in a written statement. It announced the proceeding after Bay Area Rapid Transit’s board unanimously adopted the shutdown policy earlier in the day (CD Dec 2 p11). “I have asked Commission staff to review these critical issues and consider the constraints that the Communications Act, First Amendment, and other laws and policies place upon potential service interruptions,” Genachowski wrote. “We will soon announce an open, public process to provide guidance on these issues."
The chairman called BART’s action “an important step in responding to legitimate concerns” about the August cutoff to prevent a political demonstration expected on the platform of a downtown San Francisco station in the commuter rail system. “We are not endorsing the policy,” said the FCC official who spoke on condition of anonymity. BART board President Bob Franklin had said his agency added word for word both sentences suggested by an unspecified commission official in a phone conversation late Wednesday. In our interview, the FCC official wouldn’t comment on the relationship between the commission’s involvement in the policy’s creation and its posture toward the results.
Genachowski indicated that the FCC will take a critical look at what’s required to make a cutoff policy like BART’s legitimate. “The FCC is dedicated to preserving the availability and openness of communications networks,” he said. “It is also committed to ensuring that communications technologies are harnessed to protect the public, and that first responders and other public safety officers have the tools they need for their important work. For interruption of communications service to be permissible or advisable, it must clear a high substantive and procedural bar."
Any suggestion that the FCC had left BART in the lurch up to the last minute is misplaced, the commission official indicated. The board found itself unable to adopt a policy at an October meeting where members and the local agency’s general counsel said the FCC hadn’t supplied requested guidance. The commission had provided “feedback,” the official said. “We discussed the principles and the issues at stake,” he said. “I wouldn’t necessarily say we provided them guidance.”