Speaking at the Consumer Electronic Show, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler said a final vote on new Net Neutrality rules will happen next month, and suggested it could include a major reclassification of internet service.
But some skeptics are withholding their elation.
“We’re going to propose rules that say that no blocking, no throttling, [no] paid prioritization, all that list of issues, and that there is a yardstick against which behavior should be measured. And that yardstick is ‘just and reasonable,’” Wheeler told convention-goers in Las Vegas.
Based on his Wednesday comments, Wheeler appears to be backtracking from an initial proposal he offered that would have allowed for “paid prioritization,” which enabled service providers and content creators to make deals with each other to create faster access lanes to consumers, as long as such deals were “commercially reasonable.”
But on Wednesday, Wheeler said “it became obvious that ‘commercially reasonable’ could be interpreted as what is reasonable for the ISPs, not what’s reasonable for consumers or innovators.”
He promoted a different standard, “just reasonable,” that underpins most of the rule making under Title II of the Communications Act, which regulates common carrier utilities like telephone companies.
Proponents of Net Neutrality, including President Obama, have called for the internet to be reclassified under Title II, to allow the FCC to make stronger rules to protect access for consumers.
Wheeler said his final proposal would be presented to his fellow commissioners for a vote on February 26th.
The overtures have already received praise from Capitol Hill.
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) issued a press release upon hearing the news.
“I am pleased to hear that Chairman Wheeler is being guided by Title II on the FCC’s path toward new open Internet rules,” he said. “The best way to prevent the broadband behemoths from erecting online tollbooths and undermining the openness of the Internet is to reclassify broadband under Title II.”
But just how far Wheeler goes in the context of Title II reclassification is still unclear. As FCC Chairman, Wheeler has often talked about hybrid solutions and balanced approaches in enforcing Net Neutrality.
Watchdog organization Common Cause voiced concerns on Wednesday that the FCC may not be willing to go far enough with Title II reclassification.
An adviser to the group and former FCC commissioner Michael Copps expressed concern that “in an effort to calm the roiling political waters, the Commission might forbear from too much.”
“The authority of the Commission to act on consumer protection, privacy, public safety, universal service, disability, and reasonableness standards must not be compromised or frittered away in some misguided effort to tone down opposition to reclassification,” he said.
During his talk at CES, Wheeler made references to the Telecommunication Act of 1996, which put wireless phone networks under Title II authority, but also afforded the industry a number of exemptions under the law.
He lauded how the arrangement has been “monumentally successful.”
But Copps cautioned against being too gentle with Internet service providers. Calling the upcoming vote “without doubt, the most important decision the FCC has been called on to make in decades,” he urged his colleagues not shy away from bold action.
“Be very careful what you give up now because in the consolidated, competition-free world of broadband, the FCC may rue the day it surrendered its authority to protect the public interest,” he said.
If the FCC does issue strong Net Neutrality rules, it might not encounter much opposition from the public. As The Sentinel previously reported, both Republicans and Democrats are overwhelmingly are in favor of Net Neutrality by a margin of four-to-one, according to the results of a University of Delaware poll released in November.
