Industry Groups Say Ending De Minimis Exception Would Stifle Innovation
The FCC should keep the de minimis rule as part of broader hearing-aid compatibility rules, said TIA, Motorola and CTIA. But advocates for the hearing-impaired are expected to ask the FCC to end the exception. Under the rule, a handset maker need not offer a hearing aid-compatible unit if it offers fewer than two models per air interface. That allowed Apple to debut its first handset, the iPhone, without offering a hearing-aid compatible version. The FCC asked interested parties to file comments.
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The issue is a “tough” one for the agency, an FCC official said. “I do think people here are pretty serious about not stifling innovation,” the official said.
“The de minimis exception ensures that manufacturers can avoid diverting resources to technologies that do not prove to be successful,” Motorola said. “The exception facilitates entry into the handset market by new entrants thus increasing competition,” it said, citing the iPhone. “Apple, like several other manufacturers, including Motorola, has successfully produced initial devices and fallen under the de minimis exception,” the firm said. “But there is no evidence showing that Apple will continue to produce only two or fewer handset models indefinitely.”
The exception is not meant to encourage handset makers to introduce a limited range of models in the U.S., TIA said. “The exception was created to address the competitive pressures and risks involved in bringing new technologies to market applicable to all companies, regardless of size,” TIA said. CTIA said the exception is “working exactly as intended by the Commission to encourage innovation and competition while assuring consumers a wide choice of hearing aid compatible wireless handsets.”
On the opposite side, comments are to be filed by the Hearing Loss Association of America and the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Telecommunications Access, said a lobbyist for those groups.
“A permanent de minimis exception makes no sense for resource-rich companies whose marketing models will always produce only one or two wireless handset models,” the engineering center said in its comments. “This is the case, for example, with the iPhone, which may -- for the foreseeable future -- be the only wireless handset that is produced by Apple.” The group said Apple has already moved on to a second generation of the iPhone for the purposes of the hearing-aide rules and “it is not clear that the newer version will count as a second phone, or as simply a replacement for the first phone.” In an earlier filing the groups slammed the exception for the “problems it poses consumers who wish to purchase phones from billionaire companies like Apple and Google, which only produce one or two wireless handsets.”