Microsoft representatives met separately with FCC’s Wireline and ...

Microsoft representatives met separately with FCC’s Wireline and Media Bureaus Mon. to urge adoption of High Tech Broadband Coalition’s “connectivity” principles in wireline and cable broadband access proceedings. Microsoft counsel Scott Harris said in ex parte letter explaining meeting: “The content, applications and devices that have proliferated as the Internet has become a mass-market medium have proliferated in large measure because innovators have been able to rely on the fact that, in the dial-up world, the provider of the underlying facility does not -- and indeed cannot -- discriminate against the types of information traversing its system or the devices that are attached to that system.” Letter said it was “not clear that those norms -- and thus the benefits that flow from them -- will prevail in the broadband world envisioned by the Commission’s [rulemaking proposals].”