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I was saddened to learn that Commissioner Joshua Wright is resigning from the Federal Trade Commission. Commissioner Wright leaves the agency with a tremendous legacy. He brought to the FTC’s decision-making groundbreaking economic analysis, such as his opinion in Ardagh/St. Gobain that the government should evaluate possible merger efficiencies under a standard of proof similar to that applied to predicted anticompetitive effects. He proposed and reached across the aisle to accomplish major reforms, such as the FTC’s recent clarification of its Section 5 authority to police “unfair methods of competition” (something the agency had never done in its century-long existence).

Read the full piece here.

The Order represents a substantial and unprecedented expansion of the FCC’s claimed authority. The Commission asserts authority to implement agency-defined policy by any means over the entire broadband communications infrastructure of the United States—in the words of FCC Chairman Wheeler, “[t]he most powerful network ever known to Man”[1]—under the auspices of FCC regulation; and it assumes the ability to regulate even beyond this already incredibly broad scope on an “ancillary” or “secondary” basis so long as such regulation has at least a Rube-Goldberg-like connection to broadband deployment. In the Order, the Commission claims authority that it has consistently disclaimed; it ignores this court’s holding in Verizon v. FCC, 740 F.3d 623 (D.C. Cir. 2014) (“Verizon”); and it bends to the point of breaking the statutory structure and purpose of the Communications and Telecommunications Acts. For all of these reasons, the Order should be rejected as exceeding the Commission’s statutory authority and as presenting and addressing major questions—questions of “deep economic and political significance,” see, e.g., King v. Burwell, No. 14-114, slip op. at 8 (2015)—that can only be addressed by Congress. See Randolph May, Chevron Decision’s Domain May Be Shrinking, THE HILL (Jul. 7, 2015).

The Commission’s authority is based in the 1934 Act, as modified by the 1996 Act. The general purpose of the 1934 Act was to establish and maintain a pervasively-regulated federal telephone monopoly built upon a relatively simple and static technology. This was the status quo for most of the 20th century, during which time the FCC had authority to regulate every aspect of the telecommunications industry—down to investment decisions, pricing, business plans, and even employment decisions. As technology progressed, however, competition found its way into various parts of the industry, upsetting the regulated monopoly structure. This ultimately led to passage of the 1996 Act, the general purpose of which was to deregulate the telecommunications industry—that is, to get the FCC out of the business of pervasive regulation and to rely, instead, on competition.[2] This objective has proven effective: Over the past two decades, competition has driven hundreds of billions of dollars of private investment, the telecommunications capabilities available to all Americans have expanded dramatically, and competition—while still developing—has increased substantially. The range of technologies available to every American has exceeded expectations, at costs and in a timeframe previously unimagined, and at a pace that leads the world.[3]

Today, many Americans are continuously engaged in online interactions. The Internet is the locus of significant political and educational activity; it is an indispensable source of basic and emergency news and information; it is a central hub for social interaction and organization; it is where people go to conduct business and find work; it is how many Americans engage with their communities and leaders; and it has generated hundreds of billions of dollars of annual economic activity.

Regulation of the Internet, in other words, presents questions of “vast ‘economic and political significance,’” Utility Air Regulatory Group v. Envtl. Prot. Agency, 134 S. Ct. 2427, 2444 (2014) (“UARG”), as substantial as any ever considered by a federal agency.

While the Commission disclaims authority to regulate significant swaths of the Internet ecosystem, the Order is nonetheless premised on interpretations of the 1934 Act that do give it authority over that ecosystem. This court should greet the Commission’s claimed authority with substantial skepticism. See UARG, 134 S. Ct. at 2444 (“When an agency claims to discover in a long-extant statute an unheralded power to regulate ‘a significant portion of the American economy,’ we typically greet its announcement with a measure of skepticism.”) (emphasis added) (quoting Brown & Williamson v. Food & Drug Admin., 529 U.S. 120, 159 (2000) (“Brown & Williamson”). This is especially true given the statutory structure and purpose of the 1996 Act and the Commission’s historical, hands-off approach to the Internet. See King v. Burwell, slip op. at 15 (courts “must turn to the broader structure of the Act to determine the meaning” of language within a statute). Although this court addressed and rejected a challenge to the 2010 Order on these grounds, the Supreme Court has in the intervening months decided two cases—UARG and King v. Burwell—that revitalize the challenge, especially given the 2015 Order’s more aggressive posture.

The FCC claims that new rules were needed to prevent blocking, throttling, and discrimination on the Internet. But the poor fit between the Commission’s preferred regulatory regime and the statutory authority upon which it rests is manifest. This disconnect is made clear by the numerous effects of the regulations that the Commission must describe as “ancillary” or “secondary,” and the numerous statutory provisions that must be forborne from or otherwise ignored in order to make the Order feasible.

In short, the Order rests upon a confusing patchwork of individual clauses from scattered sections of the Act, sewn together without regard to the context, structure, purpose, or limitations of the Act, in order to “find” a statutory basis for the Commission’s preferred approach to regulating the Internet. As such, it fails to “bear[] in mind the ‘fundamental canon of statutory construction that the words of a statute must be read in their context and with a view to their place in the overall statutory scheme.’” UARG, 134 S. Ct. at 2441 (quoting Brown & Williamson, 529 U.S. at 133).

Accordingly, the court should vacate the Order

[1] See Remarks of FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, Silicon Flatirons Center (Feb. 9, 2015) at 5, available at https://www.fcc.gov/document/chairman-wheeler-siliconflatirons-center-boulder-colorado.

[2] See, e.g., FCC Chairman William Kennard, A New Federal Communications Commission for the 21st Century, I-A (1999), available at http://transition.fcc.gov/Reports/fcc21.html. (“With the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, Congress recognized that competition should be the organizing principle of our communications law and policy and should replace micromanagement and monopoly regulation.”).

[3] See id. (“[A]s competition develops across what had been distinct industries, we should level… regulation down to the least burdensome level necessary to protect the public interest. Our guiding principle should be to presume that new entrants and competitors should not be subjected to legacy regulation.”)

Summary

Is net neutrality necessary to protect First Amendment values in the 21st Century? Or does the First Amendment actually prevent net neutrality regulation?  How can both of these questions be considered simultaneously?

At issue is a conflict of visions about the nature of the liberty protected by the First Amendment. Philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously described two clashing concepts of liberty — negative and positive. Simply, negative liberty is freedom from external interference. Positive liberty, on the other hand, is freedom to do something, including having the power and resources necessary to do it.

For example, negative liberty means that no one may rightfully take my property away from me without my consent. Positive liberty means that I have a right to health care that must be provided for me if I cannot afford it on my own.

Positive rights necessarily involve at least some subjugation of the rights of others. A right to health care, for instance, would violate the rights of those who must provide or subsidize health care services without their consent. Further, it would infringe upon others’ positive rights insofar as there are scarce resources available to pay for all such rights.

Conversely, negative rights are compossible with one another, which means all people could hold them simultaneously. These rights apply only against aggressors—e.g., rapists, murderers, and thieves—and not against those who are respecting the rights of others.

In this article, we examine the debate over the First Amendment merits of the Federal Communications Commission’s (“FCC”) “Open Internet” Order issued in March 2015.

Remember when net neutrality wasn’t going to involve rate regulation and it was crazy to say that it would? Or that it wouldn’t lead to regulation of edge providers? Or that it was only about the last mile and not interconnection? Well, if the early petitions and complaints are a preview of more to come, the Open Internet Order may end up having the FCC regulating rates for interconnection and extending the reach of its privacy rules to edge providers.

On Monday, Consumer Watchdog petitioned the FCC to not only apply Customer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI) rules originally meant for telephone companies to ISPs, but to also start a rulemaking to require edge providers to honor Do Not Track requests in order to “promote broadband deployment” under Section 706. Of course, we warned of this possibility in our joint ICLE-TechFreedom legal comments:

For instance, it is not clear why the FCC could not, through Section 706, mandate “network level” copyright enforcement schemes or the DNS blocking that was at the heart of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). . . Thus, it would appear that Section 706, as re-interpreted by the FCC, would, under the D.C. Circuit’s Verizon decision, allow the FCC sweeping power to regulate the Internet up to and including (but not beyond) the process of “communications” on end-user devices. This could include not only copyright regulation but everything from cybersecurity to privacy to technical standards. (emphasis added).

While the merits of Do Not Track are debatable, it is worth noting that privacy regulation can go too far and actually drastically change the Internet ecosystem. In fact, it is actually a plausible scenario that overregulating data collection online could lead to the greater use of paywalls to access content.  This may actually be a greater threat to Internet Openness than anything ISPs have done.

And then yesterday, the first complaint under the new Open Internet rule was brought against Time Warner Cable by a small streaming video company called Commercial Network Services. According to several news stories, CNS “plans to file a peering complaint against Time Warner Cable under the Federal Communications Commission’s new network-neutrality rules unless the company strikes a free peering deal ASAP.” In other words, CNS is asking for rate regulation for interconnection. Under the Open Internet Order, the FCC can rule on such complaints, but it can only rule on a case-by-case basis. Either TWC assents to free peering, or the FCC intervenes and sets the rate for them, or the FCC dismisses the complaint altogether and pushes such decisions down the road.

This was another predictable development that many critics of the Open Internet Order warned about: there was no way to really avoid rate regulation once the FCC reclassified ISPs. While the FCC could reject this complaint, it is clear that they have the ability to impose de facto rate regulation through case-by-case adjudication. Whether it is rate regulation according to Title II (which the FCC ostensibly didn’t do through forbearance) is beside the point. This will have the same practical economic effects and will be functionally indistinguishable if/when it occurs.

In sum, while neither of these actions were contemplated by the FCC (they claim), such abstract rules are going to lead to random complaints like these, and companies are going to have to use the “ask FCC permission” process to try to figure out beforehand whether they should be investing or whether they’re going to be slammed. As Geoff Manne said in Wired:

That’s right—this new regime, which credits itself with preserving “permissionless innovation,” just put a bullet in its head. It puts innovators on notice, and ensures that the FCC has the authority (if it holds up in court) to enforce its vague rule against whatever it finds objectionable.

I mean, I don’t wanna brag or nothin, but it seems to me that we critics have been right so far. The reclassification of broadband Internet service as Title II has had the (supposedly) unintended consequence of sweeping in far more (both in scope of application and rules) than was supposedly bargained for. Hopefully the FCC rejects the petition and the complaint and reverses this course before it breaks the Internet.

Filed under: administrative, federal communications commission, international center for law & economics, internet, net neutrality, political economy, politics, regulation, technology, telecommunications Tagged: FCC, Federal Communications Commission, internet, net neutrality, Open Internet Order, politics, Time Warner Cable

The TCPA is an Antiquated Law

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (“TCPA”) is back in the news following a letter sent to PayPal from the Enforcement Bureau of the FCC.  At issue are amendments that PayPal intends to introduce into its end user agreement. Specifically, PayPal is planning on including an automated call and text message system with which it would reach out to its users to inform them of account updates, perform quality assurance checks, and provide promotional offers.

Enter the TCPA, which, as the Enforcement Bureau noted in its letter, has been used for over twenty years by the FCC to “protect consumers from harassing, intrusive, and unwanted calls and text messages.” The FCC has two primary concerns in its warning to PayPal. First, there was no formal agreement between PayPal and its users that would satisfy the FCC’s rules and allow PayPal to use an automated call system. And, perhaps most importantly, PayPal is not entitled to simply attach an “automated calls” clause to its user agreement as a condition of providing the PayPal service (as it clearly intends to do with its amendments).

There are a number of things wrong with the TCPA and the FCC’s decision to enforce its provisions against PayPal in the current instance. The FCC has the power to provide for some limited exemptions to the TCPA’s prohibition on automated dialing systems. Most applicable here, the FCC has the discretion to provide exemptions where calls to cell phone users won’t result in those users being billed for the calls. Although most consumers still buy plans that allot minutes for their monthly use, the practical reality for most cell phone users is that they no longer need to count minutes for every call. Users typically have a large number of minutes on their plans, and certainly many of those minutes can go unused. It seems that the progression of technology and the economics of cellphones over the last twenty-five years should warrant a Congressional revisit to the underlying justifications of at least this prohibition in the TCPA.

However, exceptions aside, there remains a much larger issue with the TCPA, one that is also rooted in the outdated technological assumptions underlying the law. The TCPA was meant to prevent dedicated telemarketing companies from using the latest in “automated dialing” technology circa 1991 from harassing people. It was not intended to stymie legitimate businesses from experimenting with more efficient methods of contacting their own customers.

The text of the law underscores its technological antiquity:  according to the TCPA, an “automatic telephone dialing system” means equipment which “has the capacity” to sequentially dial random numbers. This is to say, the equipment that was contemplated when the law was written was software-enabled phones that were purpose built to enable telemarketing firms to make blanket cold calls to every number in a given area code. The language clearly doesn’t contemplate phones connected to general purpose computing resources, as most phone systems are today.

The modern phone systems, connected to intelligent computer backends, are designed to flexibly reach out to hundreds or thousands of existing customers at a time, and in a way that efficiently enhances the customer’s experience with the company. Technically, yes, these systems are capable of auto-dialing a large number of random recipients; however, when a company like PayPal uses this technology, its purpose is clearly different than that employed by the equivalent of spammers on the phone system. Not having a nexus between an intent to random-dial and a particular harm experienced by an end user is a major hole in the TCPA. Particularly in this case, it seems fairly absurd that the TCPA could be used to prevent PayPal from interacting with its own customers.

Further, there is a lot at stake for those accused of violating the TCPA. In the PayPal warning letter, the FCC noted that it is empowered to levy a $16,000 fine per call or text message that it finds violates the terms of the TCPA. That’s bad, but it’s nowhere near as bad as it could get. The TCPA also contains a private right of action that was meant to encourage individual consumers to take telemarketers to small claims court in their local state.  Each individual consumer is entitled to receive provable damages or statutory damages of $500.00, whichever is greater. If willfulness can be proven, the damages are trebled, which in effect means that most individual plaintiffs in the know will plead willfulness, and wait for either a settlement conference or trial to sort the particulars out.

However, over the years a cottage industry has built up around class action lawyers aggregating “harmed” plaintiffs who had received unwanted automatic calls or texts, and forcing settlements in the tens of millions of dollars. The math is pretty simple. A large company with lots of customers may be tempted to use an automatic system to send out account information and offer alerts. If it sends out five hundred thousand auto calls or texts, that could result in “damages” in the amount of $250M in a class action suit. A settlement for five or ten million dollars is a deal by comparison. For instance, in 2013 Bank of America entered into a $32M settlement for texts and calls made between 2007 and 2013 to 7.7 million people.  If they had gone to trial and lost, the damages could have been as much as $3.8B!

The purpose of the TCPA was to prevent abusive telemarketers from harassing people, not to defeat the use of an entire technology that can be employed to increase efficiency for businesses and lower costs for consumers. The per call penalties associated with violating the TCPA, along with imprecise and antiquated language in the law, provide a major incentive to use the legal system to punish well-meaning companies that are just operating their non-telemarketing businesses in a reasonable manner. It’s time to seriously revise this law in light of the changes in technology over the past twenty-five years.

Filed under: consumer protection, federal communications commission, regulation, technology, telecommunications Tagged: Federal Communications Commission, innovation, regulation, technology

Summary

“‘Capricious’ is defined as ‘given to sudden and unaccountable changes of mood or behavior.’ That is just the word to describe the FCC’s decision in its 2014 Order to reverse a quarter century of agency practice by a vote of 3-to-2 and suddenly declare unlawful scores of JSAs between local television broadcast stations, many of which were originally approved by the FCC and have been in place for a decade or longer. The FCC’s action was not only capricious, but also contrary to law for two fundamental reasons.

First, the 2014 Order extends the FCC’s outdated ‘duopoly’ rule to JSAs that have never before been subject to it, many of which were blessed by the agency, without first determining whether that rule is still in the public interest. The ‘duopoly’ rule — first adopted in 1964 during the age of black-and-white TV — prohibits one entity from owning FCC licenses to two or more TV stations in the same local market unless there are at least eight independently owned stations in that market…The FCC’s 2014 Order makes a mockery of this congressional directive. In it, the Commission announced that, instead of completing its statutorily-mandated 2010 Quadrennial Review of its local ownership rules, it would roll that review into a new 2014 Quadrennial Review, while retaining its duopoly rule pending completion of that review because it had ‘tentatively’ concluded that it was still necessary. This Court should not accept this regulatory legerdemain. The 1996 Act does not allow the FCC to retain its duopoly rule in its current form without making the statutorily-required determination that it is still necessary. A ‘tentative’ conclusion that does not take into account the significant changes both in competition policy and in the market for video programming that have occurred since the current rule was first adopted in 1999 is not an acceptable substitute.

Second, having illegally retained the outdated duopoly rule, the 2014 Order then dramatically expands its scope by amending the FCC’s local ownership attribution rules to make the rule applicable to JSAs, which had never before been subject to it. The Commission thereby suddenly declares unlawful JSAs in scores of local markets, many of which have been operating for a decade or longer without any harm to competition. Even more remarkably, it does so despite the fact that both the DOJ and the FCC itself had previously reviewed many of these JSAs and concluded that they were not likely to lessen competition. In doing so, the FCC also fails to examine the empirical evidence accumulated over the nearly two decades some of these JSAs have been operating. That evidence shows that many of these JSAs have substantially reduced the costs of operating TV stations and improved the quality of their programming without causing any harm to competition, thereby serving the public interest…”

Ben Sperry and I have a long piece on net neutrality in the latest issue of Reason Magazine entitled, “How to Break the Internet.” It’s part of a special collection of articles and videos dedicated to the proposition “Don’t Tread on My Internet!”

Reason has put together a great bunch of material, and packaged it in a special retro-designed page that will make you think it’s the 1990s all over again (complete with flaming graphics and dancing Internet babies).

Here’s a taste of our article:

“Net neutrality” sounds like a good idea. It isn’t.

As political slogans go, the phrase net neutrality has been enormously effective, riling up the chattering classes and forcing a sea change in the government’s decades-old hands-off approach to regulating the Internet. But as an organizing principle for the Internet, the concept is dangerously misguided. That is especially true of the particular form of net neutrality regulation proposed in February by Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Tom Wheeler.

Net neutrality backers traffic in fear. Pushing a suite of suggested interventions, they warn of rapacious cable operators who seek to control online media and other content by “picking winners and losers” on the Internet. They proclaim that regulation is the only way to stave off “fast lanes” that would render your favorite website “invisible” unless it’s one of the corporate-favored. They declare that it will shelter startups, guarantee free expression, and preserve the great, egalitarian “openness” of the Internet.

No decent person, in other words, could be against net neutrality.

In truth, this latest campaign to regulate the Internet is an apt illustration of F.A. Hayek’s famous observation that “the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” Egged on by a bootleggers-and-Baptists coalition of rent-seeking industry groups and corporation-hating progressives (and bolstered by a highly unusual proclamation from the White House), Chairman Wheeler and his staff are attempting to design something they know very little about-not just the sprawling Internet of today, but also the unknowable Internet of tomorrow.

And the rest of the contents of the site are great, as well. Among other things, there’s:

• “Why are Edward Snowden’s supporters so eager to give the government more control over the Internet?” Matt Welch’s  take on the contradictions in the thinking of net neutrality’s biggest advocates.
• “The Feds want a back door into your computer. Again.” Declan McCullagh on the eternal return of government attempts to pre-hack your technology.
• “Uncle Sam wants your Fitbit.” Adam Thierer on the coming clampdown on data coursing through the Internet of Things.
• Mike Godwin on how net neutrality can hurt developing countries most of all.
• “How states are planning to grab tax dollars for online sales,” by Veronique de Rugy
• FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai on why net neutrality is “a solution that won’t work to a problem that simply doesn’t exist.”
• “8 great libertarian apps that make your world a little freer and a whole lot easier to navigate.”

There’s all that, plus enough flaming images and dancing babies to make your eyes bleed. Highly recommended!

Filed under: net neutrality, regulation, technology, telecommunications, television Tagged: ajit pai, internet, net neutrality, reason magazine, regulating the Internet

Summary

“Promoting broadband deployment should be the overarching goal of everything the FCC does. To that extent, we applaud the Commission for finding time to include an eleven (11) – paragraph Notice of Inquiry about how promote broadband deployment in its new Broadband Progress Report. Yet this seems to be, quite literally, an afterthought — a small gesture towards removing actual barriers to broadband deployment after a significant expenditure of staff resources on crafting new regulations that either have nothing to do with broadband deployment or would probably discourage broadband deployment…”

Republican FCC Commissioners Ajit Pai and Mike O’Rielly spoke about their opposition to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules on net neutrality. The FCC voted 3-2 the previous day to regulate the Internet as a public utility.