Verizon: Title II Can't Be Applied to Mobile

Verizon execs told top Federal Communications Commission staffers that the FCC can't "subject" mobile broadband to Title II regulations even if it wanted to.

In a meeting at the FCC, Verizon VP and Associate General Counsel William Johnson said that such an approach is foreclosed by a statutory prohibition on applying common carrier regulations to private mobile services, including Internet access. "Because mobile broadband Internet access service cannot, on its own, be used to place calls to telephone numbers, and CMRS cannot be used to connect with (for example) Google’s search engine or Amazon.com or any of the millions of other sources of online content, these two services are not substitutes, and cannot be deemed “functionally equivalent," Verizon told the FCC.