Monday, February 20, 2012

No Out-of-Bounds Outage Requirements

It looks like the FCC pulled back from some of the proposals for reporting outages by Internet providers. In a December 2011 post, "Stopping Regulatory Encroachment on Broadband,"I was critical of various FCC efforts -- including the proposed outage rules for IP VoIP services -- which would have the effect of extending legacy analog-era regulations to Internet providers.

It appears that the Commission's recent action is limited to fairly reasonable reporting requirements, and, for this, it deserves credit.

There are times aplenty when the FCC deserves criticism for regulatory overreaching, so when it commits acts of regulatory reasonableness, I have no hesitancy in offering kudos.