From Telecommunications Reports

With Rep. Bob Goodlatte's (R., Va.) broadband "regulatory relief" bill thought to be moving toward a vote in the House Judiciary Committee, opponents of the Internet Freedom Act (HR 1686) have mounted an intense lobbying campaign to keep it off the committee's agenda.

Several congressional and industry sources say those efforts appear to be working. "There's little committee support for going ahead with a markup," an industry source told TR late last week. Another source, who is lobbying against the bill, said, "All the staffers I met said their bosses don't want a markup, and most don't think it will happen."

A spokesman for the House Judiciary Committee couldn't confirm the bill's support base as of Friday, May 12. "The legislation is not on our agenda for [this] week," he said.

But Rep. Rick Boucher (D., Va.), one of the bill's authors, was confident the measure had garnered enough support to move through the Judiciary Committee. "I believe I have the votes" for a markup and "am hopeful about getting one soon," Rep. Boucher told TR Tuesday, May 9.

Reps. Boucher and Goodlatte recently amended their broadband "relief" bill by dropping language requiring cable TV operators to provide nondiscriminatory access to their cable modem plant (TR, May 8). In its place, the lawmakers have proposed directing the General Accounting Office to study the effectiveness of the cable TV industry's "open-access" policies-including memorandums of understanding (MOUs) recently adopted by some cable TV operators.

Rep. Boucher said the change was made to better reflect the "great deal of progress" the cable TV industry had made in agreeing to provide unaffiliated Internet service providers with nondiscriminatory access to their cable modem platforms. He singled out Time Warner, Inc.'s open-access MOU as the "best job to date," and said it should be the "standard against which open-access policies of the other cable companies are measured."

"No other cable TV provider has been as specific" in its MOU as Time Warner, Rep. Boucher said in a speech delivered May 9 at a Women in Government Relations luncheon in Washington. "And it remains to be seen whether they will meet this test. In the event that they do, there's no reason to pass [open-access] legislation," he said. "In the event that they don't, Rep. Goodlatte and I will return to this issue in the next Congress."

Despite appeasing most opponents of the open-access mandate, the measure has encountered resistance from telecom interests opposed to granting the Bell companies relief from restrictions on their provision of in-region interLATA (local access and transport area) data services.

State regulators, competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs), and interexchange carriers last week told Congress that they remained opposed to the revamped version of the bill because of the interLATA data provision.

"Congress should address broadband deployment to rural and urban areas directly and in a competitively and technologically neutral way, not by removing the Bells' incentives to open their local markets," the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commission told the Judiciary Committee in a letter May 11.

A coalition of CLECs, interexchange carriers, and the Personal Communications Industry Association concurred. "HR 1686 would stifle competition in two critical markets: local data communications and Internet access services," the Competitive Broadband Coalition said in a letter May 8 to the committee.

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The Competitive Broadband Coalition members include the Association of Communications Enterprises (ASCENT), the Association for Local Telecommunications Services (ALTS), AT&T, the Commercial Internet eXchange Association (CIX), CompTel (Competitive Telecommunications Association), Cable & Wireless, Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), Montana Telecommunications Association, Personal Communications Industry Association (PCIA), Sprint, Touch America and WorldCom. More information can be found at http://www.competitivebroadband.org/1041/home.jsp