NCTA Backs Home Schooling

By John Eggerton -- Multichannel News, 3/8/2010 8:07:00 AM

Washington — Th e National Cable & Telecommunications Association is promoting home schooling in an eff ort to head off suggestions that cable-modem service might need to be more heavily regulated to fit into the government’s plans for universal broadband funding.

In a letter to Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski, the cable-industry trade group said the FCC does not need to classify Internet access as a telecommunications service to justify supporting it through the existing Universal Service Fund.

Th e FCC has said it wants to expand the fund, which supports residential telephone service to hard-to-reach areas and broadband for schools, to include residential broadband subsidies.

Some have argued that to bring it into the Universal Service Fund, the FCC might need to reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service — with mandatory access provisions — from a more lightly regulated information service. Moreover, Comcast is challenging the FCC’s authority in rebuking the operator for how it had managed traffic from the peer-to-peer file-sharing service BitTorrent.

Te NCTA, though, said USF support of broadband to schools is an educational mandate that could be expanded to homes. “It is entirely reasonable to read the statutory directive to support Internet access for classrooms to include support for residential broadband service to households where it is reasonably likely that such service would be used for educational purposes,” the association said.

The NCTA said the FCC has sufficient authority to expand the definition of classroom to the homes of kids.

Art Brodsky, a spokesman for Public Knowledge, a group that argued the FCC might need to invoke regulations under Title II of the federal No Child Left Behind law, said the NCTA is trying to have it both ways. “What they are saying is, ‘Hey, the FCC has the authority to be your cash machine, but they don’t have any regulatory authority.’ ”

He also said cable operators instigated the debate with Comcast’s challenge of the FCC’s BitTorrent order. Genachowski has repeatedly said he thinks the FCC has the authority to regulate the Internet, but has not said where that authority comes from. He again declined to elaborate on the regulatory philosophy in an interview with The Washington Post last week.