The Great Quadrangle
Back in March 2004, the FCC issued a remarkable piece of paper — an “IP-Enabled Services” notice of proposed rulemaking. Someone sidled up to me and said, “it's all over! This is Computer Four! The FCC is in charge!”
In a nutshell, the March 2004 notice suggested that the FCC believed it had jurisdiction over “IP-enabled services” (that is, anything using the Internet Protocol) under its “ancillary” powers in Title I of the 1996 Act. (Translation: even though the statute giving the FCC its power doesn't say anything about the internet, the FCC believes that it has authority to make rules about “services” that use IP. It gets this authority, it believes, from a little line in the first, general Title of the Act that gives it “necessary and proper” internal housekeeping rulemaking authority. So we're into a standardless, undefined area — all the other Titles are quite specific. So far no one is stopping the FCC and the Supreme Court BrandX opinion defers to the FCC's interpretation of its authority. But I digress).
This was a dramatic statement. The Domain Name System depends on IP. All web sites depend on IP. Email. You name it. The FCC said it was thinking about what “social policies” to apply to these “services.”
Since then, we've seen several moves to apply particular “social policies” to, in particular, “interconnected VoIP” services and highspeed internet access providers. The FCC has said that it can broaden what “interconnected VoIP” means, but for the moment it means voice applications that are capable of connecting to the traditional phone system (even if they don't actually connect). It's a sort of “fruit of the poisoned tree” move — as soon as some part of an application or suite of applications is capable of connecting, the whole thing/company has to be compliant.
The first three “social policies” have been E911, CALEA, and Universal Service funding. Each is a story of its own. (The CALEA story had a another milestone moment a couple of weeks ago when law enforcement filed a petition for an expedited rulemaking essentially saying that the wireless packet data they get is inadequate under CALEA — they want more precise data. This has potential design implications for any nascent service.)
I've heard that today the Commission adopted a fourth “social policy” for “interconnected VoIP”: accessibility compliance under Sec. 255. We'll see what the requirements are — right now there's nothing on the FCC site.
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