Does the FCC Ignore Consumer Complaints?

When people file complaints about communication services such as telemarketing calls, cell phone billing rates, junk faxes to the Federal Communications Commission it is the agency's job to listen. However, the question of just how closely the FCC is listening is now uncertain.

A report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) (Link PDF) states that of the 454,000 complaints the FCC received between 2003 and 2006, 86 percent of the investigations were closed without any action being taken, and no indication of why. The GAO isn't happy about those numbers.

The GAO, which oversees the FCC, is requesting a reorganization of the FCC's databases so that an actual quantitative measurement of the FCC's success can be attained. The report states of the FCC's Enforcement Bureau: "The Enforcement Bureau's ability to assess the impact of its enforcement program is limited because it does not have a well-defined enforcement strategy, specific enforcement goals, or performance measures."

This isn't the first time the FCC has been unable to get its act together. Just recently the FCC missed its chance to gain more control over cable television regulation.

Measuring Success by Fines Alone is Not a Good Idea

While one perspective would be to say that the FCC isn't properly regulating communications, I feel there are more worrying implications of the GAO report. The FCC could be doing a fine job regulating communications, but the GAO seems to measure FCC success by the number of fines dished out in response to complaints.

FCC Enforcement Bureau chief Kris Anne Monteith responded to the GAO report with her own letter which indicates (Link PDF) that of the 86 percent of investigations closed without taking action, 71 percent were found to actually be compliant with regulations. That is the complaints were about, for example, a wireless carrier's billing policies - not a complaint about a billing screw up. I know some don't see a difference between the two but I think there is a valid distinction between complaints over business practices and complaints against business when something goes awry.

Lets throw the FCC a bone here, I say. Of the huge number of complaints that the FCC receives each day the majority of them are bound to be false complaints by overzealous and whining consumers.

It would not make sense for the FCC to take action in cases where a customer complained about their cell phone bill being too high. But if the GAO is measuring FCC effectiveness by the percentage of fines it gives out, then that is a serious issue undermining the effectiveness of the FCC.

Comments

There is some very interesting subtext here that, so far, seems not to have seen much light of day.

A cable network like Comcast's is a shared media network, that is, all subscibers share bandwidth on a given segment. This type of network has a very unfortunate property. As the bandwidth usage approaches 70 to 80% or so, it goes into what's called "congestive collapse". The result is that the bandwidth available to all users on the particular shared segment goes to zero. This is already happening in parts of Comcast's network and no doubt, P2P traffic is a big contributer.

Verizon, in contrast, does not have this problem with their FIOS network. This network allocates dedicated bandwidth for each subscriber with more than enough to accommodate P2P traffic.

The offer of supporting P4P by Verizon not only helps their own network, but goes to the heart of a rapidly increasing disadvantage for Comcast that will ultimately be very expensive to fix.

will1948

March 14, 2008

10:49 AM PT