Telecommunications Act may get a makeover, hopefully new version will mention the "internet" -- via @NYTimes [Quote]
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Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, and Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, said in a joint statement that they would hold meetings in June to examine how the Communications Act meets the current needs of consumers, the telecommunications industry and the Federal Communications Commission.
Let me preface this by saying that I feel like I have a good basic grasp of the issues at play here, but I'm wide open to correction if I'm confused about something.
I posted in April about how the DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the FCC in a case where the regulatory agency had sanctioned Comcast for throttling BitTorrent traffic.
Since then, there has been talk at the FCC of partially reclassifying broadband internet (PDF) to apply provisions of different sections of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Why the change? Well, among other things, it would grant the FCC the authority to impose, as Ars Technica puts it, "a stripped-down version of common carrier nondiscrimination rules" -- and would allow sanctions like the ones struck down by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals to stand.
If the Congressional revisions to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 manage to move forward, those changes would, if passed, trump and likely circumscribe anything the FCC attempts to implement in the way of reclassification efforts. That, in my mind, seems to send a signal from the legislators to the FCC, suggesting that FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski consider leaving this one to the legislature before investing too much time and energy in making regulatory changes that may be undercut by the revisions to the law.
Just as the 1996 revision updated the original 1934 telecommunications legislation to let telephone companies, over-the-air broadcasters, and cable companies all play in each others' sandboxes, any changes to the 1996 version would focus on the availability, administration, and pricing of high-speed broadband internet access relative to the regulatory framework already imposed on older technologies.
First, of course, they would have to add in the words "broadband" and "internet" -- which don't even appear in the act as it was passed in 1996. That means we're not looking at a timeline of weeks or even months, but maybe years.
But hey, you have to start somewhere, right?
