WASHINGTON-States will no longer be able to regulate the wireless industry under language included in the latest draft of the Senate telecommunications-reform bill. The question now for the wireless industry is whether the decision will remain as the Senate Commerce Committee continues marking up the bill.
The Senate Commerce Committee began marking up the Communications Act of 2006 last Thursday afternoon, but after 213 amendments were filed it became clear the process would not be finished in one session as originally planned. When three floor votes were called, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, shocked the audience by adjourning the meeting until this week.
Since the wireless pre-emption issue is in the last title of the bill, any action on it could slip until mid-week. However, if the 14-8 committee vote on pre-empting economic regulation of Voice over Internet Protocol is any guide, the wireless industry could be in for a big victory.
Wireless trade association CTIA’s advocacy wing, mywireless.org, has run an advertising campaign urging Congress to implement “a national framework” for wireless. Currently, states are precluded from regulating the prices that wireless customers pay, but are allowed to regulate the “terms and conditions” of service.
Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) expressed grave concerns about the pre-emption language that appeared in the third draft.
“Maybe we need some federal pre-emption in certain circumstances, but when these provisions suddenly appear out of the blue in the third draft of this bill, then I think it heightens my concern. This bill starts to feel like a re-write of the Communications Act which is not what I thought we were trying to do. I thought we were trying to do that next year,” said Nelson.
Regardless of what Nelson may have believed, Stevens made clear to reporters that this bill is comprehensive.
“This is a new communications bill. It’s trying to level the field between telecommunications, communications, information services and data services, whatever all these segregated things out there,” said Stevens.
CTIA has been criticized for not being able to convince lawmakers to include wireless pre-emption in previous drafts. The House of Representatives passed its version of telecommunications reform June 8 without a pre-emption provision.
State regulators are concerned with the news.
“The inclusion in this draft is really bad precedent. We will start out again next year with fewer consumer protections as part of the base proposal,” said James Bradford Ramsay, general counsel for the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, noting that there is not a lot of time left in the legislative year to finish telecommunications-reform legislation.
Although the wireless industry scored a win with pre-emption, it has so far fallen short in its push for special-access reform. Special access is a term to describe the dedicated lines used to carry traffic from a wireless base station to a mobile-switching center and/or onto the public switched telephone network. Sprint Nextel Corp. told the Senate Commerce Committee earlier this month that 99 percent of the special-access lines it uses are controlled by Bell operating companies.
Special-access reform was included in the Democratic staff draft, but has not been included in the Republican drafts. The issue is expected to be part of the mark-up process.
On the thorny subject of network neutrality, the compromise hinted at by Stevens is included and is as far as Stevens is willing to go.
“I personally believe we’ve done what we need to do about net neutrality in this bill. We have consumer protection in the FCC and in addition, we have the FCC ready to raise the flag anytime they see anything they can define as net neutrality. No one’s been able to define net neutrality to me yet. So I don’t see legislating on something no one can define,” said Stevens. “But, until somebody really defines it, why should we destroy a bill? And we will, if that net-neutrality provision goes in this bill, all this side’s going to vote against it.”
The White House has signaled that it is also opposes net neutrality.
