There is another new and interesting regulatory battle happening now at the FCC. The lobbying groups that represent the telcos and cable company – NCTA, USTelecom and the ACA – are asking the FCC to make it harder for states to sue ISPs for making misleading claims about broadband speeds.

This request was brought about from a lawsuit by the State of New York against Charter Spectrum. I wrote about that case in a March blog and won’t repeat all of the particulars. Probably the biggest reason for the suit was that Charter had not made the major upgrades and improvements that they had promised to the State. But among the many complaints, the one that worried the other ISPs the most was that Charter was not delivering the speeds that it was advertising.

This is an issue that affects many ISPs, except perhaps for some fiber networks that routinely deliver the speeds they advertise. Customer download speeds can vary for numerous reasons, with the primary reason being that networks bog down under heavy demand. But the New York complaint against Charter was not about data speeds that slowed down in the evenings; rather the complaint was that Charter advertised and sold data products that were not capable of ever reaching the advertised speeds.

Charter is perhaps the best poster child for this issue, not just because of the New York case. On their national website they only advertise a speed of 60 Mbps download, with the caveat that this is an ‘up to’ speed. I happen to have Charter in Asheville, NC and much of the time I am getting decent speeds at or near to the advertised speed. But I work all over the country and I am aware of a number of rural Charter markets where the delivered speeds are far below that 60 Mbps advertised speed. These markets appear to be like the situation in New York where the State accuses Charter of false advertising.

The filings to the FCC want a clarification that what Charter is doing is okay and that ISPs ought to be exempt from these kinds of suits. They argue that the ISP industry have always sold ‘up to’ speeds and that what they are doing fits under existing FCC regulations. And this is where it gets murky.

In the FCC’s first attempt to introduce net neutrality the FCC ordered ISPs to disclose a lot of information to customers about their broadband products, including telling them the real speeds they could expect for their purchased broadband product. Much of that first net neutrality decision was struck down due to a successful lawsuit by Verizon that claimed that the FCC didn’t have the authority to regulate broadband as laid forth by that order.

But not all of that first order was reversed by the lawsuit, including the provision that ISPs had to disclose information about their network performance, fees, data caps, etc. But since most of the original net neutrality order was reversed the FCC put the implementation of the remaining sections on hold. Last year the FCC finally decided to implement a watered-down version of the original rules, and in February of this year the FCC excused smaller ISPs from having to make the customer disclosures. But the large ISPs are now required to report specific kinds of information to customers. The ISPs interpret the current FCC rules to mean that selling ‘up to’ data products is acceptable.

Where this really gets interesting from a regulatory perspective is that the FCC might not long have the authority to deal with these sorts of requests from the ISPs. The bulk of the FCC’s authority to regulate broadband (and thus to potentially shield the ISPs in this case if they are complying with FCC regulations) comes from Title II regulation.

But the FCC seems likely to relinquish Title II authority and they have suggested that the authority to regulate ISP products should shift to the Federal Trade Commission. Unfortunately for the ISPs, the FTC has more often sided with consumers over big companies.

Since the FCC is in the process of eliminating Title II authority I wonder if they will even respond to the ISPs. Because to clarify that advertising ‘up to’ products is acceptable under Title II would essentially mean creating a new broadband regulation, something this FCC seems loathe to do. I’ve seen several other topics just recently that fall into this same no-man’s land – issues that seem to require Title II authority in order for the FCC to have jurisdiction. As much as the big ISPs complained about Title II, one has to wonder if they really want it to go away? They mostly feared the FCC using Title II to address pricing issues, but there are a lot of other issues, like this request, where broadband regulation by the FCC might be in the ISPs’ favor.