Sanders, Warren want FCC to investigate Internet prices
 

[July 14, 2015]  By Josh Peterson | Watchdog.org
 
 WASHINGTON, D.C. — Following the FCCs chairman’s recent promise that the agency would not “micromanage” broadband networks, a group of Democratic U.S. senators — including Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) — want the agency to investigate Internet prices across the nation.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) is one of several senators asking the FCC to investigate the price of consumer Internet subscriptions across the nation.Photo Credit: American Federation of Government Employees/Flickr/Creative Commons (http://bit.ly/1C3vGW3)
“We need healthy competition to foster innovation and ensure fair prices for consumers,” said Sanders and Warren in a letter to FCC chairman Tom Wheeler on Thursday.

Sens. Al Franken (D-Minn.), and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) also signed the letter.

“At the very least, Americans should be able to understand the price of the product they are buying and what their neighbors are paying for the same service,” they said.

Wheeler, in a speech at the end of June at the Brookings Institute, said the agency would promote competition and act as industry “referee,” but that “the players should be allowed to play.”

Defending his controversial new broadband rules the agency passed in February, Wheeler called the agency “arbiters of last resort, not first resort.”

“We will not micromanage networks as was done in the pre-broadband days. This means no retail rate regulation, no network unbundling, and no tariffs. In short, no “utility style regulation,” said Wheeler.

Advocates for the FCC’s new broadband rules, which regulates Internet service providers as telecommunications companies under Title II of the Telecommunications Act of 1934, called for reclassification to protect against what the senators, in their letter, said were “de facto telecommunications monopolies throughout the United States.”

“For example, just 37 percent of Americans have more than one option for high-speed broadband providers,” they said. “Given the lack of incentive for companies to provide better quality service and competitive prices, it is no surprise that individuals rank cable and Internet providers last in customer satisfaction when compared to other companies in other industries.”

But opponents of the new regime have argued the rules would stifle investment, and instead, competition should guard consumers. As the agency moves forward, Wheeler is attempting to play both sides of the debate.

In the lead up to the agency reclassifying ISPs as telcos, Wheeler promised, as he did again at Brookings, that the agency would refrain from regulating broadband networks like utility companies despite possessing the legal right to do so.

Roslyn Layton, visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute’s Center for Internet, Communications, and Technology Policy, told Watchdog.org that Wheeler’s promises are “only something that he can guarantee under his chairmanship.”

Layton, who called Wheeler a “victim of history,” said that Title II “allows those things, and there is nothing to stop state regulators from using it today or the FCC of tomorrow.”

“If Congress can do one thing, it is to end this madness. And then the FCC can get back to its knitting: getting more spectrum, what Wheeler himself acknowledged was the most important thing to do,“ she said.