FCC’s Clyburn: New broadband rules not backdoor for net neutrality

While Clyburn said she actively supports open Internet, she described Chairman Julius Genachowski’s newly proposed regulations on broadband companies as the only way to enact widely supported measures in the National Broadband Plan, which were cast in jeopardy following an April court ruling.

{mosads}The FCC’s push for reform follows a D.C. court’s
unanimous finding that the commission only has jurisdiction over “telecommunications services,” not  “information
services,” under which the Internet falls. That
left the FCC two major options as it embarked on its plan to expand high-speed Internet to 90 percent of American households: reclassify broadband so that it fell
under the same rules as phone companies, or leave it to Congress to
rewrite the law.



The FCC ultimately tapped what Chairman Julius
Genachowski called a “third way” — using a procedure called
“forbearance” to pick and choose elements of Title II to apply to
broadband providers. While it is less aggressive that all-out
reclassification, broadband companies and telecommunication firms were
nonetheless infuriated by the FCC’s new plan for regulation.



Some
opponents have since decried the FCC’s move to rein in broadband
providers as just a backdoor attempt to institute net neutrality rules,
which would prevent Internet companies from discriminating against
certain kinds of online traffic. But the commissioner also railed
Tuesday on those who have sought to conflate those two debates in an
effort to stir opposition to the FCC’s plans.


”At the outset, it must be made absolutely clear that the issue of
reclassification goes far beyond our open-Internet proceeding,” said Clyburn, a Democratic member of the commission who signaled early support for Genachowski. “It involves some of the most important parts of our National
Broadband Plan.”



“Without reclassification,
the road to achieving each of these issues is laden with landmines and
is likely to fail.”



The commission has no plans to “takeover the Internet,” nor does it hope
to impose new, burdensome rules on broadband providers, she added. Rather, the FCC only hopes to restore
the rules “that almost everyone assumed we had” before a federal court
ruled in April that the FCC’s means of enforcing them were not legally
sound, Clyburn said.