Industry, Consumer Members of EAAC Disagree Sharply on Parts of Final Report
Industry and non-industry members of the FCC’s Emergency Access Advisory Committee are ending the year locked in dispute. Consumer and other non-industry members of the group filed a statement at the FCC Friday expressing “disappointment” with comments by members of the panel representing the telecom industry. The EAAC was created as part of the Twenty-First Century Communication and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 (CVAA), which required the group to prepare a report on a tight timetable. The EAAC’s draft report was quietly released as part of a filing at the FCC earlier this month (CD Dec 15 p1).
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"The EAAC recommendations presented in this report would have benefitted from the type of review and discussion typically afforded groups addressing policies of such a diverse and important topic,” the industry members of the panel said (http://xrl.us/bmky7s). “For example, some of the EAAC’s recommendations may be inconsistent or in conflict with each other ... but these could not be reconciled by the deadline imposed by Congress.” If members of the panel had been given the right to “present alternative recommendations with different perspectives” it “would have provided the Commission with a better understanding of the diverse views of the EAAC,” the statement said.
"Many of the EAAC recommendations address issues well beyond those contemplated by Congress in Section 106 of the CVAA, while others do not reflect the careful balance and flexible approach that Congress intended by the CVAA or would prejudge the outcome of Commission pending rulemakings,” the statement said. Members of the panel representing Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, the Telecommunications Industry Association and CTIA were among those who signed the industry statement.
Consumer and other stakeholder members fired back (http://xrl.us/bmmrmi) with a statement of their own. “This response is provided because we felt that it was important to clarify the situation and to not give the FCC and the public the wrong impression about the consensus achieved,” they said. “After working very hard (scores of hours and months of calls with almost daily calls at the end) with Industry to come up with common consensus language for the EAAC recommendations we were ... disappointed when we saw this set of comments filed that seeks to re-interpret or change so many of the provisions.” The non-industry EAAC members are pleased industry members “agreed to completion of the recommendations and voted yes,” their statement said. “But it was then very contradictory that they organized and jointly questioned nearly all the key recommendations -- essentially leaving all the consumer concessions in place but backing out of theirs and the previously expressed consensus of their representatives.”