Three FCC Members Pan Latest Broadband Compromise

With a Republican Congress potentially on the way, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski is running out of options -- and time -- to find a strategy for regulating broadband that his fellow commissioners will accept and the courts will allow. Without it, he and his top advisers believe, Chairman Genachowski may be stymied in his drive to preserve the Internet's openness and extend affordable broadband to most Americans within 10 years.

After a court challenge prevented the chairman from implementing key tenets of his national broadband plan, a last-ditch compromise that might have elicited bipartisan support from the other FCC members has, instead, drawn resistance from three of the four.

Republican commissioners are urging Chairman Genachowski to scrap his original fix, which involves regulating broadband under a different provision, and instead defer to Congress -- or else face a backlash. But Democratic Commissioner Michael Copps wants Chairman Genachowski to stop stalling and put the remedy up for a commission vote while he still can -- and the clock is running down. "I would've liked to have taken that vote some time ago," Commissioner Copps said.