Parts of 833 Toll-Free Auction Rules Could Be Controversial
Questions remain about the draft rules for the upcoming auction of more than 17,000 numbers in the recently opened 833 toll-free code. Commissioners are to vote Aug. 1 on application, bidding and post-auction procedures for the FCC's first-of-its-kind auction, to be held on Dec. 17. The FCC previously chose Somos to administer the auction. The agency bills the auction as "an experiment in using competitive bidding as a way to assign toll free numbers."
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The biggest potential controversy is in the rules for responsible organizations (RespOrgs) to report ownership, said industry lawyers active in the proceeding. The FCC requires that when the RespOrg changes, the new RespOrg is required to report the change. But the draft keeps in place a requirement that if a RespOrg doesn’t follow reporting requirements it can be suspended for 60 days from the SMS 800 Toll-Free Number Registry. Industry lawyers said that requirement goes well beyond current procedures. On other issues, the FCC largely follows its proposed rules, the lawyers said. The FCC didn’t comment.
The ATIS SMS/800 Number Administration Committee (SNAC) earlier asked the FCC not to impose such a strong penalty. SNAC “believes that this penalty is unnecessarily severe, particularly given that Resp Orgs may not get timely information about these transactions,” said a June filing in docket 17-192: “ATIS SNAC believes that a tiered approach to this issue may be more appropriate. Under this approach, a noncompliant Resp Org would be notified about the apparent failure and given an opportunity to provide the information and/or explain why this information was not provided.”
Rules for the toll-free database allow “Somos to take such strong measures for matters integral to Somos’s business operations, not to information gathering functions such as this,” Verizon said in June comments.
“We are pleased the commission is setting the rules and the date for the first ever toll-free number auction,” said a spokesperson for Somos. “As the Toll-Free Numbering Administrator, we are excited to see the results of the FCC’s auction as a potential new and innovative way to modernize number administration.”
In the only recent filing on the draft, TollFreeNumbers.com said the FCC needs to provide more information upfront on how the auction will be evaluated. “If this 833 Auction is truly a ‘TEST’ we’re obviously going to have to determine if it was a success or failure,” the company said. “The Commission has required the auctioneer to keep a lot of data to determine the success, but they failed to define success, which may be the most important part of any experiment. Leaving the criteria for success open allows parties with a bias to attempt to define or justify the success or failure they desire. Any criteria defined after the fact leaves open the strong possibility that the bias of the writer has influenced their definition.”