Ted Hearn

Copps Airbrushes His Role In FCC Deregulatory Binge
August 27, 2007

Federal Communications Commission member Michael Copps frequently bemoans the agency’s deregulatory path created for cable and other broadband access providers over the past five years. The Democrat also has a tendency -- most recently in an interview with lefty blogger Matt Stoller -- to blur his own role in the debate.

“The commission went off on this great binge in the last several years of reclassifying everything,” Copps told Stoller, in an undated but evidently recent interview available at OpenLeft.com.

Put simply, there is quite bit of room between rhetoric and reality when it comes to Copps and the execution of FCC broadband policy.

Since March 2005, the FCC has voted at least four times to classify a particular broadband access provider as an unregulated information service and not as a telecommunications service subject to all those dial-up telephone regulations that were designed for the AT&T monopoly and its post-divestiture progeny, the Baby Bells.

In 2002, the FCC first deregulated cable-modem service; in 2005, telephone company digital subscriber line (DSL) service; in 2006, broadband over power line (BLP) service; and in 2007, wireless broadband.

Only once did Copps actually vote to oppose deregulation -- and that was the 2002 cable-modem decision.

On the other occasions, Copps issued only concurrences, saying the June 2005 Supreme Court ruling in the Brand X case, which upheld the 2002 cable ruling, somehow meant he couldn’t oppose creating deregulatory parity for cable’s competitors.

But the Brand X case didn’t say the FCC’s cable modem ruling was right, only that that the agency used its authority properly in making the decision. If the FCC wanted to reverse the cable decision, nothing in the Brand X ruling explicitly handcuffs the agency.

Something else is missing from Copps’s digital debating points. The truth is that with help from fellow FCC Democrat Jonathan Adelstein, he could have stopped the “great binge” they both find so troubling.

In 2005, the five-member FCC was short one Republican, meaning Copps and Adelstein could have blocked the DSL vote. And they could have done the same a year later in the BPL vote because newly arrived FCC Republican Robert McDowell, still subject to a one-year conflict of interest cooling off period, didn’t participate.

So when Copps and Adelstein applaud Net Neutrality mandates, they in fact had a hand in creating the alleged need.

Posted by Ted Hearn on August 27, 2007 | Comments (0)