Copps to Circulate Plan to Overhaul Forbearance Process
The FCC will soon tackle an overhaul of the forbearance process, acting Chairman Michael Copps told reporters at its meeting Wednesday. “I hope to be circulating something to my colleagues very soon to make this a better process than it currently is.” Verizon Tuesday withdrew forbearance petitions seeking unbundling relief in the Rhode Island and Virginia Beach, Va., markets (CD May 13 p6). Meanwhile, competitive local exchange carriers are asking the FCC to ignore Verizon’s request to withdraw.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
“I continue to be disappointed in the forbearance process as a whole,” Copps said. The FCC was “pretty close” to finishing its order on Verizon’s Rhode Island forbearance request when the carrier withdrew the petition Tuesday night, he said. Reviewing forbearance petitions is costly and labor-intensive for the FCC, he said. “It just doesn’t seem the way a policy should be made that if somebody sees [that] maybe it’s going in the wrong direction, they can just say, ‘Well, thanks, I'm out of here.'”
CompTel CEO Jerry James agreed that procedural reform is needed. “The rules of the road aren’t working, and we need action either by Congress or by the FCC,” he said in a written statement. “Fighting these forbearance petitions requires a tremendous amount of time and resources. The public interest would be far better served if these resources are used to further efforts to expand the availability and affordability of advanced communications services to consumers.”
The Government Accountability Office should “examine the costs associated with this wasteful effort,” and the FCC should adopt new procedural rules for forbearance petitions, said Heather Gold, XO Communications’ senior vice president. “It is important that such egregious misuse of government and industry resources be avoided in the future.”
CLECs urged the FCC Wednesday to block Verizon from withdrawing its petitions. The agency should instead issue an order deciding whether enough competition exists in Rhode Island and Virginia Beach to warrant relief, said TW Telecom and three other CLECs in a letter to the FCC. “There is no requirement that the FCC must accept Verizon’s withdrawal,” they said. “In other contexts, the FCC has given careful consideration to whether it should deny a request to withdraw a previously filed petition.”
Verizon said it withdrew its petitions because it didn’t want the FCC to rule in advance of a pending decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The court is expected to soon rule on the company’s appeal of the FCC’s late 2007 order denying forbearance in six metropolitan statistical areas, including Providence and Virginia Beach. It’s likely that Verizon will win that appeal, Stifel Nicolaus said in a note Tuesday.
Verizon likely got signs from the regulator that it was planning to deny the forbearance petitions, and the carrier opted to avoid a precedent-setting decision, said a CLEC lawyer. If Verizon still wants forbearance, it might not have to wait through the statutory forbearance shot clock again, which usually lasts a year and 90 days, the lawyer said. The carrier has urged the D.C. Circuit to issue an order remanding the company’s six-market petition to the FCC with a shortened time frame attached, the attorney said.
“As a policy matter, allowing Verizon to withdraw its petitions at the last minute is unsound to say the least,” the CLECs said in the letter. Incumbent carriers shouldn’t be allowed to “skew the jurisprudence in their favor by deciding which FCC decisions will be promulgated and which will not. The FCC should not accede to being manipulated in this fashion.”