NCTA: “Title II is a fatal step… we’ll sue”
February 13, 2015
As expected, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association has come out swinging against the FCC’s Title II Net Neutrality proposition. President Michael Powell says he anticipates the association will take the FCC to court.
He said that Title II would be a drastic shift for an industry that has invested billions under the assumption of continued light-touch regulation. He also said he would welcome pre-publication of the order.
Powell calls the FCC’s proposed new network neutrality rules a ‘fatal step,’ and blamed the President’s “interjection” for turning it into a Democrat vs. Republican issue.
In an interview on C-SPAN Powell pointed out that he was the one who came up with the basic net neutrality principles as FCC chairman and said that as a guidance for public policy it worked well. But he said that “with each successive commission there seemed to be an upping of the ante to prove that you were more committed to net neutrality than the previous [one].”
He says he thinks the “fatal step” was to try and reclassify Internet access under Title II as a way to get around the jurisdictional issues raised by the court in Verizon v. FCC.
Current FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has planned a vote for February 26th on classifying ISP’s under Title II common carrier rules, and is expected to have the votes to pass it.
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