""WASHINGTON—A House oversight committee on Friday said it was launching an investigation into whether the White House improperly influenced the Federal Communications Commission on its new rules for how broadband providers treat traffic on their networks.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, wrote to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler on Friday demanding all documents and communications between the FCC and the White House or other executive-branch agencies on the issue, along with all internal discussion at the FCC.
Mr. Wheeler on Wednesday made public the outlines of a proposal that would ban broadband providers from blocking, slowing down, or speeding up certain websites in exchange for payment.
The plan would use strong utility-like rules to regulate broadband companies, an approach largely in line with President Barack Obama’s call in November for the “strongest possible rules” to protect net neutrality—the principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally.
To implement those rules, Mr. Wheeler proposed reclassifying broadband from a lightly regulated information service to a more strictly overseen telecommunications service. Advocates of such an approach say that without such rules, broadband companies could charge tolls to websites for their fastest speeds, putting startups and smaller websites at a disadvantage.
“[R]eports indicate that views expressed by the White House potentially had an improper influence on the development of the draft Open Internet Order circulated internally at the Commission on February 5, 2015,” Mr. Chaffetz wrote.Mr. Wheeler had previously laid out proposals to his fellow commissioners that wouldn't have used the public-utility route. Then Mr. Obama made his statement in November, one of a series of events outlined in a Wall Street Journal article Thursday that appeared to leave Mr. Wheeler little choice but to go with the stronger rules.
Neither the White House nor the FCC responded to requests for comment.
Earlier on Friday, FCC Special Counsel Gigi Sohn rejected the notion that the president’s statement forced Mr. Wheeler’s hand.
“I think what the president’s statement did was rather than force the chairman’s hand was give him cover to do something that he already was thinking about doing,” Ms. Sohn said during an interview on C-Span.
In his letter, Mr. Chaffetz said he is particularly interested in “how the FCC communicated with the White House and other Executive Branch agencies.”
He also requested a briefing on the issue within two weeks. The commission plans to vote on the proposal Feb. 26.
Other Republicans in Congress had already expressed concerns about the FCC proposal. The chairman of the House committee that oversees the FCC, Rep. Fred Upton (R., Mich.), noted that Mr. Wheeler himself said in November that the agency was independent. “Turns out that wasn’t the case then, it’s not the case now, and the White House needs to get its hands off the FCC,” he said Thursday.
But the broadband industry and conservatives strongly opposed changing how broadband is classified, arguing it would saddle the industry with outdated regulations and depress investment in upgrading networks.Senior FCC officials said Wednesday that reclassifying broadband puts the new rules on much firmer ground in the face of a legal challenge from the broadband industry.
Mr. Wheeler’s proposal would apply the portion of the law used to regulate common carriers to broadband providers, but without invoking all of the rules designed for the old landline phone network. He specifically said the FCC wouldn’t regulate broadband prices, or force providers to lease capacity on their networks to competitors.
But those assurances were of little comfort to the broadband industry. An industry official said the FCC plan would give the agency the authority to regulate prices, allowing future commissioners to do so if they choose.
Randolph May, president of the free-market think tank The Free State Foundation, said the FCC’s plan faces serious legal hurdles.
Courts generally give independent agencies broad deference to interpret laws that guide them. Mr. May said, though, that Mr. Obama’s “active intervention has cast the FCC’s action in a light in which the courts may not accord the usual deference.”
Conservatives in Congress agreed. “The president gave a speech demanding that the FCC seize control of the Internet and treat it as a government-regulated utility. The FCC promptly turned around and behaved like an agency of the White House,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), a member of the Senate Commerce Committee, said in an interview.""
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