Comptel met with FCC Wireline Bureau officials Thursday to discuss the FCC timeline for action on the IP transition, said an ex parte filing posted Tuesday to docket 13-5 (http://bit.ly/1mnwhfV). The conversation focused on three issues Comptel wants the commission to address this year: Adopting rules to prevent the exclusionary impact of special access term and volume discount agreements; confirming IP interconnection rights for the exchange of voice traffic; and revisiting the existing copper retirement rules. Existing copper retirement rules are insufficient to protect the public interest, because they provide only for notification that the copper loop will no longer be available for competitive services, but don’t ensure an alternative form of access to last-mile facilities, said Comptel. “This creates substantial harm, particularly to small and medium size businesses that rely on competitors to provide the affordable broadband services they need to run and grow their business."

The FCC should investigate reports that carriers are forcing customers from traditional copper phone service, said a petition from Public Knowledge, The Utility Reform Network (TURN), the National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates (NASUCA) and eight other organizations filed with the commission Monday. “Complaints often state that customers are being involuntarily moved to fiber or IP-based service (or some combination thereof), even if those new technologies fail to serve all of the user’s needs or will be more expensive. Denying basic phone service to people who have relied on the network for decades violates the network compact that has successfully guided our communications policy for one hundred years.” A commission investigation is necessary to ensure the “continued vitality of the fundamental values that underlie our network, including universal service,” the petition said. The FCC has said in approving the IP trials it wants to preserve longtime principles for customers in the IP transition, “but now, the Commission is at risk of losing control of the network transition by allowing carriers to push their customers off of the traditional networks -- in violation of their obligations as telecommunications carriers -- simply to cut costs or push customers into higher cost services or packages, generating more revenue for the carrier,” the groups said in the filing. Others signing the petition include groups like the Office of the People’s Counsel-District of Columbia, that filed petitions with local PUCs alleging customers are being pushed from copper service against their will or knowledge (CD March 27 p10).

No neutrality rule bars Telcordia from serving as Local Number Portability Administrator, the Ericsson affiliate told the FCC in a letter Friday (http://bit.ly/1mSt6uX). Neustar had argued (CD May 8 p11) that the commission must select the next LNPA by notice-and-comment rulemaking because Telcordia is “barred by rule” from being selected. “These arguments are yet another transparent attempt to delay and derail the selection of the LNPA in order to force an extension of Neustar’s existing $500 million per year contract and to disregard the recommendations” of the North American Numbering Council and North American Portability Management LLC, Telcordia said. Neustar’s argument is “a plain misreading” of the relevant statute, that “attempts to elevate form over substance” -- in the process, “fundamentally” misunderstanding “the difference between a rule and an adjudication,” Telcordia said. “Ericsson continues to show impatience with a process that is not over, and in which the assessment of whether a potential vendor meets the neutrality requirement has only just begun,” a Neustar spokesman said. “Ericsson cannot choose the rules that it would like to follow and ignore the rules that are inconvenient. Our expectation is that the FCC, far from being rushed by Ericsson, will want to address the serious issues we have raised."

Mozilla’s petition to treat remote data services as a Title II service (CD May 8 p25) “represents a legally, and practically, viable path forward,” the company told an aide to FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel Thursday, an ex parte filing said (http://bit.ly/1sb5bbD). It would be a way for the commission to anchor effective open Internet rules, including no blocking, nondiscrimination and no paid prioritization to fixed or mobile Internet access services, Mozilla said. The company discussed the “substantive and procedural intersections” between its petition and the open net neutrality proceeding. It also discussed “ways to support open Internet rules through Title II authority,” the filing said. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler is facing pressure to postpone Thursday’s net neutrality NPRM vote. (See separate report above in this issue.)

The FCC should allocate the “maximum possible amount of funding” for rural broadband experiments, the Rural Broadband Policy Group told an aide to Chairman Tom Wheeler last week, an ex parte filing said (http://bit.ly/1mIPwTM). The group expressed “concern” over the proposed net neutrality rules: Rural communities want “the full Internet” and not a pay-to-play “hand-me-down.” The FCC should not “break the Internet before rural America gets it,” the group said, recommending reclassification of broadband as a Title II common carrier service.

The FCC should declare that remote delivery services are telecom services subject to Title II of the Communications Act, Mozilla proposed in a petition posted Wednesday to docket 09-191 (http://bit.ly/RsjahV). Communications within a last-mile terminating access network between a remote endpoint and an ISP’s local subscribers constitute a “delivery service,” Mozilla said. Classifying them as Title II will “help preserve the future of technology innovation online, particularly for online video communications and smartphone applications and services,” Mozilla said, calling that reclassification a “minimal, yet necessary, action to realize the statutory goals of the Communications Act in the modern era of network management and market operations.” Such an action would create space for “experimentation with pricing and other features of consumer-facing Internet access services, while at the same time separating information-only services further from the core of Commission jurisdiction,” Mozilla said. The rule wouldn’t apply to interconnection or peering functions, which involve “a distinct physical portion of the network infrastructure,” it said. “Our petition asks the FCC to use Title II, but it isn’t reclassification, because it wouldn’t reverse existing precedents,” said Mozilla senior policy engineer Chris Riley in a blog post Tuesday (http://mzl.la/RskzVB). “Our petition would not impose obligations on technology companies, but instead would safeguard them by clearly delineating services.” AT&T Vice President Hank Hultquist tweeted to Riley Wednesday: “Kudos for bringing some fresh thought to an increasingly stale debate” (http://bit.ly/RskMYN). But Columbia University computer science professor Vishal Misra doesn’t think the Mozilla proposal would achieve much. “The ISPs are not ’slowing’ any specific traffic down,” so “they are in the clear per the Mozilla proposed regulations,” Misra told us by email. “The last-mile ISPs will continue to exploit their monopoly positions and will simply find a way to offer a ‘fast lane’ to the netflixes of the world under the umbrella of paid peering. Sometimes I feel that my colleague here at Columbia (Tim Wu) did a disservice to the public by introducing this term ‘network neutrality’ that cannot be even defined properly by anyone.”

Because of lenient net neutrality rules, some ISPs have allowed Internet performance to deteriorate to create leverage over edge providers, Level 3 told an aide to FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai last week, said an ex parte filing posted in docket 09-191 Wednesday (http://bit.ly/RslvJA). ISPs are “acting like would-be robber barons for the Internet era, with control over the only means of access to their millions of residential end users,” Level 3 said. “The Commission should ensure that it doesn’t make the same mistake again,” the transit provider said, asking the commission to “require ISPs to interconnect on commercially reasonable terms.” The “heart” of such a rule would be that “an ISP must offer to interconnect without imposing access charges,” Level 3 said. “The Commission was right in the Open Internet Order to be concerned about the threats that bottleneck ISPs pose to the free and open Internet. That threat is real, and the damage to the Internet is already occurring."

The FCC plans to fine Central Telecom Long Distance $3.9 million for deceptively switching customers’ services and for illegal billing practices, the agency said in a news release Monday. The FCC found that telemarketers for the Colorado telco allegedly tricked consumers into believing that the telemarketers were calling on behalf of the consumers’ existing telephone companies, then changed the consumers’ preferred carriers without their authorization, the FCC said. Central Telecom did not comment.

FCC attempts to preempt state authority on municipal broadband would be yet “more overreach of FCC authority,” said NetCompetition.org Chairman Scott Cleland in a blog post Monday (http://bit.ly/1g3oiiu). “The big legal miscalculation here is a heroic FCC legal assumption that this would be another broadband industry versus FCC legal challenge just like the Verizon v. FCC decision, where the Court already has decided the issue of the FCC’s authority largely in the FCC’s favor.” That’s wrong, he said. “This would be less a legal challenge to the FCC’s statutory authority, but more of a Constitutional challenge of the FCC’s perceived supremacy over fundamental state sovereign functions.” Count on more than 20 state attorneys general to challenge the constitutionality of any FCC “frontal assault on their core sovereign state functions of determining economic and fiscal policy,” Cleland said. “The FCC ultimately would lose that case because there is no Chevron deference or [Communications Act] Section 706 authority empowering the FCC with an effective wholesale override of States’ constitutional rights."

The FCC plans to fine Purple Communications $11.9 million for improperly billing the Telecom Relay Service Fund, the agency said in a news release Friday. The company “sought and received millions in reimbursements from the TRS fund for customers with names that were so clearly false that they could not have been the actual names of eligible users, including names like ’sdfsdf cicwcicw,’ ‘Myname Yourname,’ and ‘Lot$a Money,'” the FCC said. “Purple’s actions have threatened the integrity of a fund that is designed to help persons with hearing and speech disabilities make phone calls,” said Enforcement Bureau acting Chief Travis LeBlanc. “We have zero tolerance for this type of abuse.” Purple billed the TRS Fund for calls by more than 40,000 registrants with names composed of “random keystrokes” and “vulgarities” such as “F*** Y**,” the bureau said in a notice of apparent liability (http://bit.ly/1iSESX5). “Purple is required to use a reasonable process to verify the names and addresses of users.” Purple did not comment.