Court Backs FCC on DSL Resale
By Ted Hearn -- Multichannel News, 6/26/2001 1:28:00 PM
Washington -- A federal court here ruled Tuesday that incumbent phone carriers are not required to provide wholesale discounts on digital-subscriber-line services they sell to Internet-service providers.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed the Federal Communications Commission's finding in 1999 that the resale requirement applied to DSL services sold to residential and business end-users, but not to DSL services sold to ISPs such as America Online Inc.
The court backed the FCC's interpretation that the wholesale-discount requirement in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 applied when incumbent phone carriers provided advanced services 'at retail.'
Agreeing with the FCC, the D.C. Circuit said the incumbent local-exchange carrier-to-ISP relationship was not an 'at retail' event because the 'ISP packages and ultimately resells the service to end-users.'
Although the 1996 law failed to define 'at retail,' the D.C. Circuit said standing doctrine required it to defer to the FCC in filling in gaps in the law, provided that the commission acts in a reasonable manner.
'We find the [FCC's] order in all respects reasonable,' the court said in rejecting an appeal by the Association of Communications Enterprises (ASCENT).
The unanimous decision was handed down by U.S. Judges Stephen F. Williams, Douglas H. Ginsburg and Judith W. Rogers in an opinion written by Ginsburg.
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