On Reading Orders by Telecommunications Regulators

Going by this site's web statistics, the most popular of my posts are those regarding CRTC rulings and orders. I suspect this is because of the relatively scarcity of in-depth discussion (from what I've found) on the web of actions of the Canadian telecommunications regulator. This is in contrast to the FCC in the US where every slightest movement on their part is analyzed -- whether rigourously or superficially -- by hordes of bloggers and more-mainstream media outlets. I wish there were more attention paid to the CRTC.

For the public, or at least those that pay more than the most casual and passive attention to regulator actions, there is a dilemma: to get beyond superficial, and sometimes misleading, reporting it is necessary to go the source and read the orders and rules that they publish. It seems that not many do this, other than the companies directly subject to those orders and rules. These companies -- typically telecommunications carriers and service providers, but sometimes their major suppliers and customers -- not only read what the regulators publish but are deeply involved in the process and have many specialists and contracters that understand the process and the network of people to influence to achieve their business objectives.

One big reason that few among the public get involved or even just read the material is that it is time-consuming. It is somewhat surprising that there is more of this avoidance in Canada since, in comparison to FCC orders, those by the CRTC are not difficult to digest. The reason is that the CRTC has more latitude than the FCC to both set policy and establish regulations. The US telecommunications regulation process is more politicized and by dint of the governing statutes there are many avenues to take the FCC to court to dispute the legality of their regulations; Congress writes telecom laws that go into an unusual level of technical detail regarding what the FCC is required and permitted to do. This is why the FCC is replete with staff lawyers and far more lawyers are employed by the industry.

A good case in point is the recent FCC Report and Order on network neutrality: FCC 10-201. This is a big document weighing in at 194 pages. It is far easier for the public to wait and read the summaries and analyses in the media and on the web. Unfortunately a number of these analyses are less than ideal since the writer may have an agenda, whether to influence the public or to stir up controversy in an effort to gain readers (aka link bait) and without some knowledge it can be difficult to know whom to trust. (Whether I am trustworthy on that score is moot since, because I see little in the Report and Order I want to comment on, I will not be providing any analysis of it.)

Beyond the mere page count, the core content of the FCC document where staff analyzes the issues and assessing the balance between their objectives, the law and the positions of intervening parties, is full of detailed legal references and written in a manner that is meant to withstand the gauntlet of the justice system. On the positive side, the core content of the document is far less than those 194 pages. That is fairly typical of FCC Reports and Orders. Here's my page count of the various parts of the network neutrality document:

• Table of contents: 1 page
• Discussion and determinations (the core of the document): 83 pages
• Procedural matters: 2 pages
• Rules: 9 pages
• List of commenting parties: 16 pages
• More discussion: 22 pages
• Statements of Commissioners: 60 pages

So there you have it: 9 pages out of 194, or less than 5%, contain rules. This is dwarfed by the 60 pages of Commissioner statements, which are mostly from the Republican dissenters. Unless you are enthralled by the political angle of telecom regulations you will most likely not miss much by skipping these 60 pages. Even less enthralling are the 16 pages of lists of people and companies that participated in the process (such as it was in this instance).

In fact the really interesting stuff isn't actually the rules themselves but the main body of discussion regarding how the FCC reached its determinations. While this is still 83 pages, a very rough guess on my part is that close to 40% of that is footnotes. For the casual (!) reader it is fairly safe to skip those, which leaves about 50 pages of text. This is a less-daunting chore since we have managed to exclude almost 3/4 of the document. A deeper reading of the document, unfortunately, will require reading some of those footnotes, but only the ones that provide background and not those that are legalese that are intended to buttress the FCC's legal position. That isn't so bad.

Although it is possible clear the clutter to reduce the quantity of reading one must do, it does help to understand the unwritten rules of the regulatory and political games underlying the proceeding, and a bit of history regarding how these things tend to unfold. That is one advantage I have since, although years ago, I once participated in these types of US regulatory proceedings. Even so, my guess is that a careful and intelligent reader who is not prone to irrationally clinging to preconceived notions will get a lot more out of the network neutrality debate, or any other contentious regulatory issue, by going to the source and reading the material published by the regulator rather than relying on others; these others may have biases or filters of convenience that distort their reporting or analysis.

The downside is the modest time and effort required to read these documents. My experience tells me that the learning curve isn't steep, so after the first one or two it gets much easier -- there is even a sort of primer in the case of the network neutrality order in the form of a 5 page press release. If you care deeply about network neutrality, usage-based billing or one of the many other current issues being considered by US and Canadian telecom regulators, reading the core content of these publications can be time well spent.