The House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology has announced it will hold an October 25th hearing with the rather all-encompassing title, “Oversight of the Federal Communications Commission.”
Among other topics, it will have all five commissioners testify on reinstating Title I regulation for ISPs, and the commission’s efforts to reform the Lifeline program. These are obvious telecommunications-related priorities for the Republican House, as they should be. There have been long-term, continuing areas of abuse, waste and fraud in the Lifeline arena, and the current Title II regulation is referred to in the hearing announcement as “onerous” and “innovation-killing.”
However, there is also the very serious problem of severe shortfalls in high cost broadband support for RLECs. If the subcommittee had just included this issue in its agenda, we would have an even better set of defined priorities.
While this may be a carefully orchestrated session, we will report if anything new or interesting comes out in testimony.
