The term Parthian shot comes from the military tactic of mounted Parthian archers retreating at a full gallop, turning their bodies back to shoot at the pursuing enemy, and Tom Wheeler has committed a classic such strike as he prepares to leave the FCC, around the idea of zero-rating services.
On the FCC site this morning we can see the regurgitation of the debate over such services involving AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, and a report prepared for the FCC and a dialog with 3 Democrat senators, Edward Markey, Richard Blumenthal and Tammy Baldwin, effectively issuing the report – supposedly at Midnight last night.
In essence, it is a working method to distinguish between the zero-rating practices of T-Mobile USA, with its Binge-on video services, which can be applied to any video supplier, at no cost, except to comply with a few key technical hurdles, compared with AT&T’s claims that DirecTV Now gets no more benefit from zero-rating than AT&Ts publicly available sponsored data service, which other OTT operators such as Netflix could potentially choose to use.
Simply put, all the evidence that this is the case has been reviewed by Wheeler and he says that he can find any truth in AT&T’s position or if DirecTV is even charged anything at all, except perhaps on paper and that the current FCC’s position is that zero rating on a fully-fledged TV replacement service should be prevented, as there is no net outward payment made by DirecTV or AT&T.
AT&T’s contention throughout has been that it spends $billions on its network, and OTT video uses it up, so this service is clearly not free, and can be seen through its capex spending – which incidentally has gone down this year.
The report was prepared by Wireless Telecommunications Bureau staff, to put forward a draft framework for evaluating zero-rating offerings, but rushed into the public domain, as Wheeler answered letters from the Senators. It highlights AT&T’s actions as the most dangerous and it applies three key rules as the democrats see it, relating to internet openness, does it involve blocking or throttling and does it represent paid prioritization. The report adds the idea of violating a general conduct rule.
The report concludes that AT&T breaks these rules and claims to prove that sponsored data to third party content providers are on less favorable terms and it levels a similar criticism to Verizon’s FreeBee Data 360 program, but says that this is less serious as Go90 is less of a TV service threat.
Republican FCC commissioner Ajit Pai immediately denounced the move, saying that the FCC’s current leadership had chosen to spend its last days the same way it spent the last few years—cutting corners on process and keeping fellow Commissioners in the dark and pursuing partisan, political agendas. He insisted in a statement on the FCC site, that the move would have no effect.
It will potentially cause a couple of things to happen – either this reports has to be rebutted in detail, before it is thrust aside by the incoming FCC chairman, or more likely an investigation into the disintegration of accepted process at the FCC could be set up, and potentially backfire on the ex-Chairman.
In effect this move does little more than serve to remind us all that the two major US political parties are miles apart in how they see the regulation of both the internet and paid video services which run across it.