Google Inc., AT&T Inc., and Verizon Communications Inc. executives met behind closed doors over the weekend with Federal Communications Commission officials in efforts to resolve a dispute over U.S. Internet regulation.
The rare Saturday session reflected attempts to reach a compromise on net-neutrality rules that would govern how phone and cable companies providing Internet connections treat Web traffic such as Google’s YouTube videos and Skype Technologies SA’s free phone calls.
The companies and senior FCC aides have been holding the private meetings since June, according to disclosure statements on the agency’s website.
The FCC may be negotiating a “secret deal” that would keep Chairman Julius Genachowski from fulfilling President Barack Obama’s pledge to back net neutrality, said Josh Silver, president of the Washington-based advocacy group Free Press. The agency may be about to “abdicate its responsibility to protect Internet users,” Silver said in an e-mailed statement.
“We are fully committed to preserving the free and open Internet,” Jen Howard, an FCC spokeswoman, said yesterday.
The long-running fight over net neutrality has pitted cable and phone companies that say they need leeway to protect the performance of their networks against content providers and advocacy groups that say the communications companies may favor their own online offerings or those of partners.
FCC Chief of Staff Edward Lazarus is leading the meetings with a core group of six industry representatives. Among them are Jim Cicconi, senior executive vice president of Dallas-based AT&T; Tom Tauke, executive vice president of New York-based Verizon; Richard Whitt, telecommunications and media counsel for Mountain View, California-based Google; and Christopher Libertelli, senior director of Luxembourg-based Skype.
All six participants declined to comment publicly on the talks.
Questions being hashed out include whether Web providers can boost delivery of some content, at the cost of slowing other traffic, and whether rules should apply to increasingly popular Web applications on mobile phones, according to the disclosure filings on the FCC website that summarize the topics discussed and name the participants.
Lazarus also has met with public-interest groups including Silver’s, Howard said in an e-mail. The sessions, held in conference rooms at the FCC’s Washington headquarters, are properly disclosed in subsequent public filings, as are all such meetings with agency staff, she said.
Howard declined to discuss the substance of the meetings. Lazarus declined to comment in an e-mail yesterday.
A proposal by Genachowski that the FCC claim authority over Internet traffic under rules long used to regulate phone calls has sparked resistance by telephone and cable companies and from members of Congress of both parties.
“He’s interested in getting something that will minimize discord,” Andrew Jay Schwartzman, senior vice president of the Washington-based Media Access Project, a public-interest law firm, said in an interview.
The backdrop is the FCC’s defeat in April before a U.S. court, which said the agency lacked the power to censure Comcast Corp. for interfering with subscribers’ Internet traffic. In response, Genachowski proposed using the rules designed for monopoly telephone service, while promising he wouldn’t invoke the associated power to regulate prices. Phone companies have said future commissions could place price controls on Internet service.
Most congressional Republicans and more than 70 House Democrats have signed letters objecting to Genachowski’s plan, and House Republican Leader John Boehner of Ohio called it “a government takeover of the Internet.”
The talks at the FCC aim to produce Internet-traffic rules that would be enforced by the agency as well as principles for legislation, said Rebecca Arbogast, a Washington-based analyst with Stifel Nicolaus & Co., in an interview.
The pace of the talks intensified in the last week of July, Arbogast said in a note to investors. A deal would be viewed as positive for telephone and cable shares, she said.
The meetings are unusual for their frequency and complexity, and because they aim in part to craft legislation rather than the regulations that are the FCC’s normal concern, said Schwartzman.
The core participants have met at least seven times since June 22, and the agency on its website lists about 50 additional meetings with trade groups and companies such as wireless operator Clearwire Corp. and cable operator Time Warner Cable Inc.
Genachowski and aides are “prepared to go forward if they need to” without a compromise, Arbogast said. “But that level of controversy is unwelcome going into the midterm” elections in November.
In addition to the four company executives attending meetings with Lazarus, participants in the sessions are Kyle McSlarrow, president of the Washington-based National Cable & Telecommunications Association and Markham Erickson, executive director of the Open Internet Coalition.
Among companies in McSlarrow’s trade group are Comcast and Time Warner Cable. Erickson’s organization, which says it works to keep the Internet fast and open, lists as supporters EBay, Google, Skype, Free Press, Media Access Project, Netflix Inc. and IAC/InterActiveCorp unit Ask.com.
(Source: Bloomberg News)
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One Response
Fox news warned about this 5 or 6 months ago. It is obama’s way to control internet to prevent conservate news
and anything that goes against his far left communist agenda. If you don’t believe me look at the commies in his inner circle, Jeff Jones, Bill Ayer and his wife,Wade
Radthke, Andy Stern and James Wallis. Go and investigate and see day by day we are loosing our rights; it is called being Nudged. These were the radical of 60’s coming back to haunt us out of capitalism which they call a disease