Open Internet Coalition Comments in the Matter of Broadband Industry Practices

Summary of Comments:

The current broadband situation in this country is unacceptable. In the last few years, the United States has slipped well behind the world leaders in the deployment and performance of our broadband networks. In today's market for broadband Internet access, consumers have at best only two choices for accessing high speed Internet services. Consequently, this proceeding is an important element in the growing national conversation about the need to engage in a significant course correction.

The Open Internet Coalition believes that a necessary first step is to develop a comprehensive federal broadband policy that ensures that we increase affordable access to the Internet and promote a healthy, open Internet ecosystem. The open and neutral architecture of the Internet has enabled consumers to access any web site and use any service of their choosing and has allowed innovation to occur at the edges of the network, free from centralized control of gatekeepers. Maintaining an open Internet is critical to ensure that applications developers have incentives to invest in new products and services and will better enable entrepreneurs to bring the benefits of "innovation without permission" to consumers.

The Commission should act now to address inherent, structural problems in the broadband market to prevent them from developing into intractable regulatory problems in the future. Cable and DSL network operators still comprise an effective duopoly, together accounting for more than 96 percent of high-speed lines. Newer broadband technologies, such as wireless, suffer from limitations that keep them from providing effective competition to the cable/DSL duopoly. By setting the appropriate "rules of the road" now, the Commission can best address the structural problems in the broadband market and the incentive of network operators to discriminate against third-party applications and content, and lay the groundwork for a market in which consumers see the benefit of competition at both the application-level and network-level.

The Open Internet Coalition urges the Commission to collect and evaluate information regarding network operators' network management practices. By making such information public, the Commission, along with other affected parties, would be able to ensure that network operators are living up to the principles of the Commission's Broadband Policy Statement and are otherwise not engaging in discriminatory conduct.

In order to protect consumers and provide application developers with sufficient incentives to innovate, the Commission should also make its Broadband Policy Statement enforceable and should, at minimum, add an enforceable non-discrimination principle to the existing four principles.

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