Two House Democrats are soliciting signatures for a letter to FCC...

Two House Democrats are soliciting signatures for a letter to FCC Chmn. Powell urging regulations to prevent companies from blocking access to Internet content. House Internet Caucus Co-Chmn. Boucher (D-Va.) and Rep. Kind (D- Wis.) circulated a Dear Colleague letter Wed. telling fellow House members that broadband providers might be tempted to control customer access to content to favor content of interest to them: “Imagine a broadband provider blocking or slowing access to Amazon.com and instead directing you quickly to the provider’s affiliated commerce site, or preventing the use of an Internet device on the network.” In the draft letter, Boucher and Kind admit that while there might not be a concrete example of such discrimination, “as a regulatory body, the FCC has the greater responsibility of implementing rules and policies to ensure that those harms never occur in the first instance. The time for the FCC to act by appropriate regulation to prevent that harm is now.” The avenue for such an FCC rulemaking, Boucher and Kind said, would be the agency’s long-standing enforcement of open communications networks, dating back to permitting consumers to attach devices to phone networks not made by the phone company. “In the absence of assurance that principles of open network architectures will be applied to both telephone and cable broadband, concerns have been voiced that network operators will act to limit consumer activity and to limit access to content, not because of a need to manage the network to assure functionality, but because of a desire to favor content affiliated with the broadband provider.” Among those raising such concerns have been Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) Exec. Dir. Jeffrey Chester. Appealing to Hill colleagues, all of whom now carry Blackberry wireless devices, Boucher and Kind said personal digital assistants were a type of device “that will need unfettered access to ‘always-on’ high-speed connections.” Members have until Sept. 12 to sign the letter to Powell.