EarthLink urged FCC late Fri. to maintain regulatory restraints o...

proposed rulemaking (CC 01-337) that could ease ILECs’ classification as “dominant” for some services, EarthLink said “the regulations under consideration here… will determine whether the incumbent LECs can stop thousands of other ISPs from also investing in and delivering… broadband applications that consumers may demand.” Company said it didn’t believe Sec. 10 of Telecom Act permitted FCC to forbear from regulating ILEC advanced services, especially those sold on wholesale basis to ISPs. “The Commission should carefully analyze the wholesale DSL market that exists today where the incumbent ILECs maintain significant market control,” EarthLink said: “Faced with a dominant carrier, the appropriate regulatory response should be to require tariffing and tariff review, to demand cost justification of rates and to scrutinize for anticompetitive activities. Without this, incumbent LECs have every incentive and ability to stall and foreclose intramodal competition among ISPs, leaving consumers without Internet service choices.” Expressing similar concerns about ILEC dominance, ALTS said FCC “should not declare the ILECs nondominant in the retail broadband market while they continue to possess market power in the wholesale market.” ALTS said ILECs “have the incentive and the means to use their market power in the wholesale market to negatively affect the retail market, and this should be a prime concern for the Commission.” SBC, which had filed petition seeking nondominant treatment along lines proposed by FCC, said Commission “should take decisive action to remove dominant carrier regulation… that is both unnecessary and harmful to competition and broadband deployment.” SBC said ILECs should be declared nondominant when they provide broadband services to mass market customers, for example high-speed Internet access, as well as services “that enable larger business customers to transmit and route packetized data.” SBC said those markets were “intensively competitive” and ILECs posed “no threat to exercise or acquire market power” in them. In providing high-speed Internet access, ILECs compete against facilities- based cable modem, satellite and wireless providers. Situation is similar for provision of broadband services to larger business customers, SBC said: “Ever since packet- switched services were introduced in the early 1990s, the Commission has recognized that the market in highly competitive and that the incumbent LECs were new entrants in the market.”