FCC cracks down on "gamesmanship" of line-sharing rules

Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps has been promising to do it for months: clean up the process by which incumbent carriers are allowed to raise the prices they charge smaller telcos for access to their networks. Now it's done—his last action as the agency's interim boss. Among other requirements, a "forbearance" petition must now be "complete as filed" from the get-go, the FCC ruled on Monday. The reform responds to charges that Verizon, AT&T, and Qwest finesse the procedure by revising their petitions over the course of a year, or withdrawing them if it looks like they won't be granted. "While I don't expect that these rules will end the Commission's consideration of forbearance petitions," Copps declared on Monday. "I am hopeful that they will inject some rationality into the process and greatly reduce the procedural gamesmanship that we've too often seen in the forbearance proceedings of the past." The order comes ten days after the FCC lost a big forbearance case in court—the DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that the agency got it wrong when it refused to let Verizon raise wholesale rates in six east coast markets.