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NSR Policy: Impact on ISPs of the Digital Discrimination Item: Don’t Lose Sleep

Plus, More on Title II Item and today’s AI WH Summit

In this Weekend Update, we do a deep dive on the item addressing digital discrimination that the Commission will adopt at its November meeting. We always thought the item would be largely benign, creating more headline risks for ISPs than economic risk. Upon reading the actual item, it is even more benign than we had anticipated. It refrains from making any accusations against any company and declines to consider any historic acts by ISPs as in violation of the digital discrimination rules. It also sets up an internal FCC process that will reduce public knowledge about allegations. We don’t doubt that the item will be criticized by some who allege that the item will result in setting up new barriers for deployments and create new rights for the FCC to micromanage broadband services, but considering what the item actually does, we think such predictions are wrong. We also discuss how and why we are likely to discuss these same issues in about five years’ time.

We also offer some quick thoughts on two changes (on the critical issues of rate regulation and state preemption) from the draft Title II order incorporated into the final NPRM adopted at the October meeting and the White House event today on Artificial Intelligence.

Companies Implicated by Analysis: AT&T (T), Verizon (VZ), Frontier (FYBR), Charter (CHTR), Comcast (CMCSA), T-Mobile (TMUS), Alphabet (GOOG), Meta (META), Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT)