Let
me ask you this: “If a man has one foot in a bucket of boiling water and the
other foot in a bucket of ice, do you think that, on average, he would be comfortable?”
Answer:
Not really.
Well,
if the FCC, for purposes of pursuing further net neutrality regulation, puts
one foot in the Title II bucket and the other in the Section 706 bucket, do you
think that, on average, the agency is
likely, as a legal matter, to comfortably succeed?
Answer:
Not really.
Each
time I think about the various so-called “hybrid” proposals that agglomerate
various aspects of Title II common carrier regulation and Section 706 “commercial
reasonableness” authority in the quest for some “compromise” version of
Internet provider regulation, I am reminded of the poor rube with one foot in
the boiling water bucket and the other in the ice bucket. In the main, the
various hybrid versions are offered as a way to avoid the acknowledged adverse
effects of applying Title II’s public utility-style regulation to Internet
providers and as a way of bolstering the legally problematic case for invoking pure
Title II or Section 706 regulation alone.
Initially,
I must confess that, for the most part, the hybrid proposals are difficult to
understand on their own terms, at least for me. And I’ve been involved with
communications law and policy for almost forty years now. On average, the hybrid proposals make me very uncomfortable.
The
proffered hybrids come in many varieties, but among them are these. Rep. Henry
Waxman has a “springing Title II proposal” whereby the FCC simultaneously would
subject Internet providers to net neutrality regulation under Section 706,
while also declaring Internet access services to be a telecommunications
service subject to Title II. Somehow, Title II regulation would only spring
into effect if the FCC’s exercise of Section 706 authority were held unlawful.
Rep. Waxman later offered a variation of his “springing” proposal whereby the
FCC would classify Internet providers as common carriers but then immediately forbear
from imposing all of the Title II provisions, while at the same time relying on
Section 706 to adopt bright-line rules prohibiting blocking, throttling, and
prioritization of traffic.
Mozilla
has put forward a proposal urging the FCC to classify a so-called Internet “edge
provider’s” remote delivery of content to a “retail” user endpoint as a common
carrier service and then to forbear from any “inapplicable or undesirable
provisions” of Title II. In somewhat of a mirror image of Mozilla’s proposal,
Columbia law professors Tim Wu and Tejas Narechania propose that the FCC divide
Internet access service into a “retail” end user’s request for data and an edge
provider’s response to the retail user’s request. Under this hybrid model, the
edge provider’s response (or “sender-side’” response as the Columbia professors
call it) would be classified as telecommunications subject to Title II
regulation, while the retail user’s request for data would not be. Again, the
exercise of the Commission’s forbearance authority is invoked to avoid
application of harmful regulatory requirements that the Commission may not wish
to apply to the sender-side entity.
The
various hybrid proposals obviously are complicated, and to some extent
contradictory. In reality, so-called edge providers and end users can be one
and the same individual and entity, depending on the way they are using
Internet access service at any particular time. Indeed, during the same
Internet “session,” the supposed roles may switch back-and-forth, depending on
the way the Internet is used.
In
any event, from a policy perspective, the hybrid proposals are problematical
because, in essence, the objective of each is to apply some degree of public
utility-style regulation to Internet providers in the absence of evidence of
present market failure or consumer harm. In this piece, however, I wish to put
aside pure policy arguments and focus on two principal legal defects that
pervade the hybrid agglomerations.
To
one degree or another, the hybrid proposals depend on the successful exercise
of the Commission’s forbearance authority and/or its successful
reclassification of Internet providers as regulated common carriers under Title
II of the Communications Act rather than as information service providers
outside of the public utility realm.
The exercise of forbearance authority: Given the
constrained way the Commission previously has interpreted the forbearance
authority provision adopted as part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, it
is highly unlikely the agency will be able successfully to forbear from applying
some or all of Title II’s burdensome regulatory requirements to Internet
providers. This is true even for requirements upon which there is widespread
agreement that they should not be applied.
As
FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly pointed out in remarks at the Free
State Foundation’s recent “Thinking the
Unthinkable” seminar,
the Commission’s insistence on using intensely granular product and geographic
analyses, which it has defended in court, requires “such an extraordinary
showing of insufficient market power backed by very specific market data, that
the forbearance process resembles little of its original intention.” I have
made much the same point for many years. Thus, in an April 2011 piece titled “Rolling Back
Regulation at the FCC: How Congress Can Let Competition Flourish,” I called on
Congress to revise the forbearance provision in a way that would require the
agency to more readily grant justifiable forbearance requests.
Furthermore,
as Commissioner O’Rielly went on to explain:
“[T]he findings
that the Commission would have to make to justify forbearance run counter to
the arguments for imposing net neutrality in the first place: broadband
providers seemingly have the market power to discriminate against other
providers and consumers. In other words, the Commission would be forced to
argue that imposing Title II is necessary because of the discriminatory
possibilities that broadband providers may inflict on the marketplace but somehow the same broadband providers
would be required to show that imposition of parts of Title II are not
necessary to ensure just, reasonable and non-discriminatory practices, which is
the first part of the statutory test for Section 10 forbearance….”
Harry
Houdini has long since performed his last act of trickery, but were he alive, even
Houdini couldn’t fool a panel of judges with such an inherently contradictory
switcheroo.
Classification under Title II of parts
of Internet access:
The hybrid proposals put forward by Mozilla and Professors Wu and Narechania (and
others) are more exercises in Aristotelian metaphysics than in law compliance. Aristotelian
metaphysics
“examines what can be asserted about anything that exists just because of its
existence and not because of any special qualities it has.” Something like this
is what is going on with regard to the proposals to simply declare as separable
elements of Internet access service what the Commission previously declared to
be a single integrated service. And not only did the Commission previously
declare Internet access service to be a single integrated service, it
successfully defended this position in the Supreme Court in the landmark Brand X case.
“I don't think the integrated, inseparable
nature of ISPs' service offerings, from a functional standpoint, and from a
consumer's perspective, has changed since the Brand X decision, so it
won't be easy for the Commission to argue that it is changing its mind about
the proper classification based on changed consumer perceptions of the service
offerings' functionality. And to the extent that the Brand X Court cited
favorably to the FCC's claims concerning the then-emerging marketplace
competition and the dynamism in the broadband marketplace, those factors, if
anything, today argue even more strongly for a non-Title II common carrier
classification.”
I understand that Tim
Wu, Mozilla, and other hybridists suggest that either the “sender-side” portion
of the Internet service or the “retail side” portion can be isolated and
treated differentially for purposes of regulatory classification. They base
this in part on assertions that consumer perspectives concerning the integrated
nature of Internet access service have changed since the Commission’s 2002
classification decision. But I have seen no Commission findings in support of
this assertion. Moreover, as Justice Thomas declared in the Brand X majority opinion: “The entire question is
whether the products here are functionally integrated (like the components of a
car) or functionally separate (like pets and leashes).” While Justice Thomas
readily acknowledged the deference due to the FCC “in the first instance” under the Chevron doctrine, he said the classification of Internet access
“turns not on the language of the Act, but on the functional particulars of how
Internet technology works and how it is provided….”
The argument the
hybridists now put forward is similar to the one accepted by Justice Scalia in Brand X – but unfortunately for them it was
in a dissent. The majority rejected the notion that the “telecommunications”
and “information” elements, or the “sender-side” and “retail” end user side, or
the “wholesale” or “retail” elements – however cleverly characterized – are functionally
separable for regulatory purposes. Should the Commission now attempt to cull
out any element of Internet access for purposes of applying Title II
regulation, the agency will bear an especially heavy burden. I submit that,
upon judicial review,
a proper understanding of the law will prevail over a particularly foggy
exercise of Aristotelian metaphysics.
In
sum, the hybrid proposals do not offer a viable solution for FCC Chairman Tom
Wheeler, or others, who may be wary of offending the most fervent net
neutrality advocates. To his credit, it now appears Chairman Wheeler, having in
mind the difficulties of either a pure Title II or hybrid Title II approach,
recognizes the need to take time to reassess the way forward.
It
certainly makes sense for the Commission to hit the “pause” button. This is especially
so when no one seriously claims that Internet providers presently are acting in ways that cause consumers or competition actual harm.
Mere
conjecture concerning future potential
harms is not a sufficient reason for the Commission to plow ahead with
consideration of hybrid proposals – to put one foot in a bucket of boiling
water and the other in a bucket of ice, all the while deceiving itself into
thinking, on average, it feels comfy.
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