Sprint Corp. said Friday that it wouldn’t object if regulators reclassified the Internet as a utility, breaking from the position of most major Internet providers in the country.
The statement from the nation’s third-place carrier comes about a week after Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler signaled he was planning to reclassify broadband as a public utility, technically known as a Title II Telecommunications Service.
Such a reclassification would bring Internet providers under greater regulatory oversight, something that public-interest groups have been advocating and Internet providers have been resisting.
“Sprint does not believe that a light-touch application of Title II would harm the continued investment in, and deployment of, mobile broadband services,” Sprint’s chief technology officer, Stephen Bye, wrote to regulators. Many expect that Wheeler’s proposal would exclude, or forbear, some of the harshest regulations linked to Title II.
Sprint’s counterparts in the wireless industry have taken a different stance. Industry trade groups, along with AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., have indicated they will take legal action to fight any move by the FCC to broaden its reach to include data services that have had lighter regulation. T-Mobile US Inc. CEO John Legere has said reclassifying broadband under Title II is the wrong approach.
Reclassifying the Internet under Title II would bring about a host of other regulations, first written in the 1930s when AT&T was a monopoly. Wheeler has indicated the majority of those regulations wouldn’t be applied. The purpose of the Title II classification, rather, primarily would be to help the FCC’s net-neutrality rules withstand a court challenge.
Wireless carriers had been mostly exempted from the FCC’s previous net-neutrality rules, which prevented Internet providers from blocking or degrading the quality of online content, and from charging some websites for more seamless delivery. Those rules were thrown out about a year ago after a legal challenge from Verizon.
Emphasizing the need for a light touch, Sprint said carriers still need the ability to manage their networks for congestion, which had previously been a primary rationale for exempting wireless carriers from net neutrality altogether.
