AT&T chief Randall Stephenson warns of litigation over net neutrality

AT&T chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson shared his disappointment with the recent Federal Communication Commission ruling on net neutrality and warned the FCC that litigation would follow, en.yibada.com reported.

In a recent interview on "Squawk Box", Stephenson publicly declared his plan to bring to an end the efforts of the FCC for reclassification of the internet under Title II services.
He said he supported a free and open internet that did not include blocking and prioritisation and added reclassifying the internet was not the proper way to do it.
FCC chairman Tom Wheeler earlier this month said his agency would propose a resolution that would reclassify the internet under the Title II of the 1934 Communications Act.

This would see the internet included in the category of power services. The FCC would in doing so have full authority for regulation of the internet so the service stayed free and completely open, according to Hot Hardware.

According to Stephenson, under the president's urging with the FCC, the issue had moved from pushing a free and open internet to regulating the internet end-to-end. There would be litigation, he added.

Once regulations were put in place it would be hard to undo it, according to PCMag. Further, Title II services were taxed differently and this meant that whatever regulation would be imposed, it would be the consumers that would be hardly hit.

Meanwhile, arstechnica.com reported that net neutrality advocates were generally pleased by the Federal Communications Commission's latest plan for regulating internet service providers. However some were pointing out potential problems.

Attorney Matt Wood, the policy director for advocacy group Free Press, told the FCC last week that it faced "legal obstacles" in how it intended to regulate internet service providers. Wheeler proposed to reclassify internet service providers as common carriers in two parts with ISPs being common carriers in their relationships with home internet consumers. They would also be common carriers in their business relationships with "edge providers," companies that offered services, applications, and content over the internet.

"[Both] the service to the end user and to the edge provider are classified under Title II [of the Communications Act]," the proposal states.

This could get the FCC in trouble, Wood argues: On the statutory definition question, as we noted in our earlier letter, services purportedly offered to a ''remote'' edge provider-when there is no physical connection between that edge provider and the carrier in question-are not services offered ''directly'' to the edge provider, according to any precedent we could find. If there is no physical connection, and thus no obvious ''direct'' relationship between the carrier and the remote edge provider, it is hard to imagine how the service can qualify as a telecom service under Section 153(53) of the Act. That subsection stipulates that a telecom service must be offered ''directly'' to the recipient.