DOJ: FCC Should Scrutinize IPCS Site Commissions

DOJ supports FCC efforts to lower prices and increase competition for incarcerated people’s communications services (IPCS), the department said Monday. “IPCS markets across the country suffer from a lack of competition, which harms both incarcerated people and those who purchase communications services to communicate with them,” the DOJ Antitrust Division said in a filing in docket 23-62. “Incarcerated people and their loved ones face an effective monopoly after the correctional facility selects a provider for its communications services. This process imposes long-term, structural barriers to competition and deprives consumers the benefits of a robust, competitive IPCS market.” Securus and Viapath “have controlled well over half of the overall market for more than a decade,” added the division: The providers’ competitors have failed to “discipline their prices” and there are “significant barriers to entry and expansion.” As a result, "unreasonably high rates, ancillary service fees, and abusive provider practices such as the seizure of unused funds in incarcerated people’s accounts without notice or refund,” characterize the market, it said. The division recommended considering “whether site commissions ought to be included as costs of providing service when determining just and reasonable rates.” Some jails and prisons prefer vendors that pay higher commissions, “but when site commissions serve to increase the rates that incarcerated people and their families pay, they work directly against the FCC’s mandate to ensure that such rates be just and reasonable,” it said. Also, the agency shouldn’t let providers "evade rate regulation by steering customers from regulated to unregulated communications services such as electronic messaging, which would cause competitive harm and dilute the intended benefits of the Martha Wright-Reed Act,” said the division: Messaging rates that incarcerated people pay “are unreasonably higher than the rates paid by people who reside outside of correctional facilities.”