Creating net neutrality rules under Title II would...
Creating net neutrality rules under Title II would require edge providers to make payments to ISPs for termination services, said George Ford, Phoenix Center chief economist, during a teleforum Wednesday. Reclassification, he said, would turn edge providers into ISP customers,…
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which would require the broadband providers under Section 203 of the Communications Act to tariff termination service for Internet content. The FCC can’t forbear the tariff because the broadband providers are considered terminating monopolies, and competition is the basis for Section 10 forbearance, said Ford, who made the argument in a policy bulletin last month (http://bit.ly/WEvdLa). That the tariff requirement hasn’t been discussed in depth during the net neutrality debate “reveals the superficial nature of this debate,” Ford said during the forum. Tariffing has “significant compliance costs,” and neither carriers nor the agency is set up to handle tariffs, which have become less common, said Wiley Rein’s Thomas Navin, a former Wireline Bureau chief, during the forum. Title II proponents disagreed. The agency could forbear the tariffing requirement in Section 203, said Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld, pointing to his Oct. 2 blog post (http://bit.ly/10K8cZV), because other statutes like Sections 201 and 202 allow the FCC to act in the case of “unjust reasonable rates and practices and otherwise protecting consumers.” Edge providers “are not in fact the customers of the end-user ISP. There is no service there,” said Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood, and “there'd be a real danger in that view,” because “quite literally every website in the world becomes a customer of Comcast’s just because I view that site on my Comcast connection.”