C'Mon FCC, Take Your Thumb off the Scale

The FCC initiated a proceeding to review special access competition way back in 2012 for which it gathered a huge amount of data from incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs), competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs) and others (a whopping 120 million records making up more than 15 Gigabytes of data). After reviewing this data, late in Feb interested parties submitted economic analyses about the state of competition in the special access marketplace. Pursuant to a Commission edict issued on the eve of the filing deadline, commenters were instructed that they could not include in the public versions of their comments any aggregate statistics that were derived from the data submitted in this proceeding without first receiving the Commission’s affirmative permission. As a result of this FCC action, only the FCC and outside counsel and consultants are allowed to see any of the calculations derived from the FCC’s data collection, including aggregated results that reveal no one’s confidential information.

The outcome of the Special Access proceeding has huge implications – it will significantly impact telecommunications infrastructure investment for the foreseeable future. Heavy-handed, monopoly-era regulation will result in fewer infrastructure jobs, slow the roll-out of new, fiber-based broadband services and faster speeds, and delay all the positive economic and social benefits those products and speeds will create. So c’mon FCC, take your thumb off the scale so that we can have a fair and transparent fact-based discussion here.