PROPOSAL WOULD USURP CONGRESSIONAL AND JUDICIAL AUTHORITY

Washington, May 6, 2010 -

Today, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced a plan to recognize broadband as a Title II telecommunications service. In response, Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL), Ranking Republican on the Communications, Technology and the Internet Subcommittee, stated, “This proposal to reclassify broadband service as a phone service under Title II of the Communications Act is a partisan maneuver.  Congress should make such a significant change.  There is no economic or legal justification for this move and the result will be a freeze in the tremendous investment and innovation we have seen over the past two decades. The Internet is the most powerful platform for innovation ever created and by his actions, Chairman Genachowski is endangering this platform.”

“Our current free-market, pro-investment policies have served us so well, as evidenced in the FCC’s National Broadband Plan showing that 95% of all Americans have access to broadband and approximately 200 million subscribers have broadband at home today, up from 8 million just ten years ago. By comparison, it took 90 years to go to from 8 million voice subscribers to 200 million.  Ironically, Chairman Genachowski’s laudable goal of maximizing broadband deployment and adoption will be most harmed by today’s announcement. It is curious, then, that Chairman Genachowski would reverse course and do an end run around Congress, where this issue should be debated.”

“Broadband is not a telecommunications service; it is an information service outside the reach of the Title II common carrier rules.  The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that view in its 2005 Brand X decision.  As I have long said, there is no problem here, and the predicate to any regulation should be a finding of market failure. That is why I have been
working on a bill -- the Internet Investment, Innovation, and Competition Preservation Act -- which would require the FCC to demonstrate such a failure before imposing Internet regulation. Moreover, it would require any such regulation to be imposed on a technologically and competitively neutral basis.”

“After decades of bipartisan agreement under Democrat- and Republican-led administrations, Congresses, and Commissions, Chairman Genachowski and the Administration should not go down this partisan path.”