This week’s FCC meeting that members would have voted on items like a free, nationwide, porn-free Internet has been put on hold. Was the meeting wasn’t canceled by lobbyists working for Verizon or AT&T? Nope, it was canceled after members of congress suggested to the FCC that the organization should be monitoring the digital transition and not focus on new projects.
“It would be counterproductive for the FCC to consider unrelated items, especially complex and controversial items that the new Congress and new Administration will have an interest in reviewing,” Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WVa.) and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) wrote in a letter to the FCC.
The Bush administration has also urged FCC chairman Kevin Martin to delay, and even scrap, the vote on the nationwide broadband. “The administration believes that the AWS-3 spectrum should be auctioned without price or product mandates,” wrote Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrezstated Gutierrez in a memo to the FCC. “The FCC should rely on market forces to determine the best use of the spectrum, subject to appropriate government rules to prevent harmful interference.”
As stated before in an earlier post, the FCC has done test on the interference issue and they’ve concluded that there wasn’t any interference. The controversial part of this plan is not the interference, it’s the filter of pornographic material that is the deciding factor as free speech advocates are expressing concerns.
The vote may come up again when the Obama appointed FCC chairpersons take over.