Powell: Internet Would Not Have Flourished Under Title II

The Jan 15 House Communications Subcommittee hearing featuring former Federal Communications Commission chairs weighing in on potential regulatory rewrites was a wide-ranging affair, but one that frequently "ranged" toward the implications of the court decision vacating the majority of the FCC's Open Internet order.

Current National Cable & Telecommunications Association Chairman Michael Powell, who was FCC chair when the commissioned classified cable broadband as an information service free of the common carrier mandatory access regulations that applied to dial-up, warned against trying to classify broadband as a Title II service in the wake of that decision -- former Democratic chairmen Michael Copps and Reed Hundt didn't have a problem with going that route. Asked if broadband would have seen the same level of investment and growth if the FCC had classified it as a telecommunications service, Powell said no. Allowing the capital required to drive that investment and innovation needs the flexibility to make choices without the risk of being put under a monopoly-era regulatory model, he added. Powell said that people should understand that putting broadband under Title II means "instantly applying thousands of pages of decades-old regulations to the Internet, with damaging consequences. Former Chairman Dick Wiley agreed that Title II would be the wrong move, saying that the FCC should not rush to reinstitute rules, but instead see how the marketplace works and only step in if there is market failure. But Copps urged the FCC to reclassify under Title II, saying he was concerned that using 706 authority, which gives the FCC the authority to remove barriers to infrastructure investment and to promote competition, could wind up being thrown out by another court. Hundt said he thought the FCC needed to move quickly to open a proceeding on the remanded rules and recraft them using either 706 authority or Title II, or both. Powell, while strongly opposed to Title II reclassification, also warned that 706 was extraordinarily broad, so how it was interpreted and applied was important.