FCC Says Vonage Preemption Doesn’t Bar State Universal Service Assessments on VoIP
An FCC order preempting states from imposing traditional phone regulation on Vonage VoIP services didn’t keep Nebraska from assessing state universal service fees on Vonage’s interconnected VoIP, the FCC told a federal appeals court. In a late-filed friend-of-the-court brief to the 8th U.S. Court of Appeals in St. Louis, the FCC said Tuesday that a federal trial court wrongly concluded that the FCC barred Nebraska from enforcing state universal service requirements on Vonage.
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The FCC filed on a Nebraska Public Service Commission appeal (Case 08-1764) of the lower court decision that all Vonage VoIP services were exempt by federal rules from paying into the state universal service fund. The FCC said its 2004 decision barring Minnesota from regulating Vonage VoIP dealt with state entry and certification requirements, not universal service. The FCC brief said Nebraska’s universal service assessment on Vonage didn’t clash with federal universal service policies, which require that interconnected VoIP providers contribute to the federal universal service fund.
Nebraska based its universal service fund assessment on Vonage intrastate revenue, and calculated the contribution using the same formulas the FCC prescribed to VoIP providers for calculating their interstate universal service contributions, the FCC said.
The issue of how to classify VoIP services under the Telecom Act has no bearing on this case, the agency said. The FCC said its requirement that interconnected VoIP providers pay into the federal universal service fund didn’t depend on VoIP’s classification, and said the Nebraska PSC contribution order fits federal policy since it also doesn’t depend on how VoIP is classified.
The FCC had to seek court permission to file its brief, It missed the June deadline for such briefs due to not knowing of the issues involved until after the lower court ruled in March, and then needed time to review that decision and prepare its brief, it said.