The FCC should declare that remote delivery services...

The FCC should declare that remote delivery services are telecom services subject to Title II of the Communications Act, Mozilla proposed in a petition posted Wednesday to docket 09-191 (http://bit.ly/RsjahV). Communications within a last-mile terminating access network between a remote endpoint and an ISP’s local subscribers constitute a “delivery service,” Mozilla said. Classifying them as Title II will “help preserve the future of technology innovation online, particularly for online video communications and smartphone applications and services,” Mozilla said, calling that reclassification a “minimal, yet necessary, action to realize the statutory goals of the Communications Act in the modern era of network management and market operations.” Such an action would create space for “experimentation with pricing and other features of consumer-facing Internet access services, while at the same time separating information-only services further from the core of Commission jurisdiction,” Mozilla said. The rule wouldn’t apply to interconnection or peering functions, which involve “a distinct physical portion of the network infrastructure,” it said. “Our petition asks the FCC to use Title II, but it isn’t reclassification, because it wouldn’t reverse existing precedents,” said Mozilla senior policy engineer Chris Riley in a blog post Tuesday (http://mzl.la/RskzVB). “Our petition would not impose obligations on technology companies, but instead would safeguard them by clearly delineating services.” AT&T Vice President Hank Hultquist tweeted to Riley Wednesday: “Kudos for bringing some fresh thought to an increasingly stale debate” (http://bit.ly/RskMYN). But Columbia University computer science professor Vishal Misra doesn’t think the Mozilla proposal would achieve much. “The ISPs are not ’slowing’ any specific traffic down,” so “they are in the clear per the Mozilla proposed regulations,” Misra told us by email. “The last-mile ISPs will continue to exploit their monopoly positions and will simply find a way to offer a ‘fast lane’ to the netflixes of the world under the umbrella of paid peering. Sometimes I feel that my colleague here at Columbia (Tim Wu) did a disservice to the public by introducing this term ‘network neutrality’ that cannot be even defined properly by anyone.”