The Democratic commissioners at the FCC are feeling pretty powerful today — the special Commission meeting slated for this morning to vote on the AT&T-BellSouth merger didn’t take place. Chairman Kevin Martin, under pressure because he’s leaving for a ten-day Asian trip tomorrow, is presumably still negotiating with Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps, the two Democrats who want conditions placed on the merger.
The two commissioners asked for a delay so that they could study the last-minute proposal submitted by AT&T yesterday that would impose some conditions on the company before it can absorb BellSouth.
“These proposals raise a number of significant questions and complex technical issues for us to consider,” the Democrats said. “In light of these developments, we believe that the best way to advance the Commission’s review is to open this process to public comment.”
Stay tuned…I would bet the impasse is over in a day, but maybe the winds are blowing in a new direction for Democrats in Washington and Copps and Adelstein are stalling for a longer period of time (namely until after the elections).
Update: Chairman Kevin Martin has agreed to postpone the vote until a November 3 meeting — notice that’s just days before the election. He also agreed to put AT&T’s last-minute conditions out for public comment.
The conditions that AT&T has proposed are quite interesting. In an odd nod to net neutrality, AT&T seemingly agreed to offer a two-year period when onsumers “could surf anywhere on the Internet and use any legal applications with the high-speed service.”
AT&T’s proposed conditions, released Friday, included freezing some wholesale prices for access to its networks for 30 months, offering high-speed Internet access to all homes in its 22-state home territory by 2008 and a pledge not to ask the FCC to lift rules for network access by rivals for 30 months.
The company raised the possibility of a condition addressing consumers’ access to Internet content, an issue known as Net neutrality. It agreed to a two-year FCC condition for its last acquisition, guaranteeing customers could surf anywhere on the Internet and use any legal applications with the high-speed service.
I haven’t seen the conditions, but seriously, AT&T can’t actually be saying that consumers are free to roam the Internet for only two more years, can it? What happens when the two year clock runs out? The so-called two-tiered Internet? Instead of a burden that AT&T must meet, this condition, if reported correctly, sounds almost like a warning.
Update: AT&T issued a statement late this afternoon attempting to minimize the delay. The company said “We ran short of time to gain final approval for the merger today, which is not uncommon in these matters.” Umm…does anybody else out there remember any previous occasion when the Commission failed twice to approve a merger (remember, the item was on the FCC’s regular meeting agenda yesterday and then the special meeting today ended up not happening at all)? AT&T also said it is open to discussing “reasonable conditions on the merger in order to obtain unanimous approval.”
Cynthia Brumfield at 1:56 PM|Comments(0)
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