ILEC Critics Push FCC on BDS; Telcos Oppose Incompas/Verizon; FSF Hits Buildings
Self-described "competition advocates" urged the FCC to move quickly to regulate business data services to protect consumers and competitors from the "market power" of incumbent telcos. "Reforms to the BDS regulatory regime must provide a platform for robust competition and…
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eliminate the monopoly and oligopoly rents that plague the BDS market," said a Public Knowledge filing posted Tuesday in docket 16-143 on a meeting it and others had with an aide to Chairman Tom Wheeler and other staffers. Also participating were representatives of Common Cause and Next Century Cities, the Computer & Communications Industry Association, New America's Open Technology Institute and the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition. They said the FCC approach "must be effective, flexible, and future-proof." A proposed test to distinguish between competitive and noncompetitive markets should focus on the existence of actual competition, not potential competition, because the agency's past predictive judgments had often been inaccurate and justified unwarranted deregulation, they said, and the test should be reapplied at regular intervals based on updated data. CenturyLink, Frontier Communications and ITTA officials addressed the "procedural, legal and policy shortcomings" of several proposals in the FCC's Further NPRM on BDS. The industry parties voiced opposition to the BDS framework proposed by Incompas/Verizon, "which contrary to those parties' claims, is not at all a 'middle ground between many different perspectives,'" said an ITTA filing on their meeting with an aide to Commission Mignon Clyburn. They emphasized the inroads cable companies have made into the BDS market and said the wireless backhaul market is "competitive axiomatically" and should be treated as such. In a blog post, Free State Foundation board member and former FCC chief economist Tim Brennan disputed that the relevant geographic market for regulating BDS services was individual buildings, which he said "makes no sense." Though the FCC wasn't proposing such a definition, he said the agency could be open to the approach in the future. "The FCC may (or may not) have good reasons for finding competition inadequate in the BDS market. However, in doing so, I hope that the agency continues to show a willingness to break precedent with past views and not adopt a view of the building as the market that would likely be unsustainable in any other context," he wrote.