Cable lobby head frets ‘Alice in Wonderland’ net neutrality plan

Federal regulators are needlessly going down the rabbit hole by toying with broad new rules for the Internet, according to the country’s top cable lobbyist.

“You’re going to make this tectonic shift to radically transform the entire regulatory framework in order to solve a minor legal problem associated with the smaller rules,” Michael Powell, the head of the nation’s top cable lobbying group and the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), said on Tuesday.

“I’ve never seen such an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ series of events in my career.”

{mosads}“While it’s self-serving, there has not been a deep-enough, honest-enough examination by the president or anyone else about what Title II really means,” he added, referring to the legal authority governing rules for public utilities.

Powell’s National Cable and Telecommunications Association has been a vocal critic of the call for the FCC to enact the strongest possible rules on the Internet by reclassifying Web service to regulate it using the agency’s Title II powers, which the FCC currently uses to police telephone lines.

The move would apply outdated regulations to the Internet and likely be tossed out by a court, critics of the move say. That could leave companies without the certainty they need to plan major, multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects for years to come.

“The consequences of this are going to be, at best, six to 10 years of prolonged ambiguity, uncertainty and confusion in a market that has settled and stabilized 20 years ago,” Powell said at a Phoenix Center telecommunications symposium.

Supporters of the move, including President Obama, have disagreed.

Reclassifying Internet service is the best way to ensure that Web users have equal, unfettered access to every website on the Internet, they say.

While there have been a few actual incidents of companies trying to slow, block or speed up some Web services, critics of strong rules point out that the concerns are largely hypothetical.

“It is really a solution in search of a problem,” said former Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.).

The lack of notable cases is not because of altruism, Powell argued, but because it makes good business sense for companies to stick to the spirit of the FCC’s rules.

“Let me be honest: Our companies are self-interested, profit-maximizing greedy guys,” he said. “They haven’t done it because it doesn’t make sense.”

–This report was updated at 1:23 p.m.