Sallet Champions Gatekeeper Approach to ISPs in Merger Reviews

The Federal Communications Commission's former general counsel Jon Sallet made the case for FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's targeting of Internet service providers as the primary threat to Internet openness. That came in a speech Dec 16 at the Capitol Future of Broadband Competition Conference in Washington (DC). In what sounded like a farewell address, Sallet—who moved to the Justice Department's antitrust division as deputy assistant attorney general earlier in 2016—delivered a lengthy address on competition and broadband providers summed up in the first subhead in the transcript of his speech: "Telecommunications Network Providers Have Incentives and Abilities To Artificially Shape Competition And Have Long Been Associated With the Exercise of Gatekeeper Power." The speech was about an approach to mergers that presupposes ISPs are going to use that power unless reined in.

Sallet said he wanted to be clear that he wasn't saying that ISPs "are the only players in the Internet ecosystem that can ever be capable of developing or exploiting this power." But that was essentially the only mention of the edge beyond talking about how online video could be discriminated against by ISPs.