Watching two governments — one in Ottawa, the other Washington — debate important broadband issues has been an illuminating experience for this American.  As Canada continues to deal with a firestorm of protests against broadband pricing ripoffs from usage-based billing, the debate over Net Neutrality achieved new levels of absurdity in Washington yesterday as a largely Republican crowd fought to overturn the FCC’s watered-down open Internet protection policies.

Watching and listening to a combined eight hours of hearings both north and south of the border this month has cast a striking contrast between our two governments.  After it was all over, I can forgive anyone who decides Congress is filled with a bunch of uninformed meat-heads who fight for the talking points attached to their fat contribution checks from the telecommunications industry.

It is unseemly watching Republicans fall all over themselves to impress AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast with their grasp of these companies’ arguments against an open and free Internet.  There are also some bad Democrats on AT&T and Verizon’s virtual payroll, but the hearings this week in the House of Representatives were over the top — a Republican Valentine’s Day present for Big Telecom, replete with clueless representatives who clearly don’t understand the concept of Net Neutrality beyond the 3×5 index cards handed to them by one of their respective staffers.  For the most reactionary members, handing out photoshopped-pictures of Leon Trotsky hugging Barack Obama in front of a spool of fiber optic cable would have been just as effective.

The deservedly-undercovered Judiciary Committee hearings featured a single wireless ISP (WISP) owner who appears to spend most of his free time writing in the Comment sections of major American newspapers and social media sites.  His concern?  A technicality in the current Net Neutrality rules about customers running web servers.  ServerGate.  There’s a hot button issue if there ever was one.  Brett Glass’ customers are much more interested in watching online video, a concept that frightens a lot of WISP owners into placing usage caps on their service to discourage them from doing that.

Chairman Walden

Another witness at that hearing came straight from a telecom industry funded think tank.  Inviting AT&T to appear themselves would have effectively cut out the middleman and saved everyone a whole lot of time.

Gigi Sohn from Public Knowledge was left alone to stick up for Julius Genachowski’s cowardly-lion Net Neutrality rules, which in this author’s opinion are barely better than nothing, fatally flawed and one court decision away from oblivion.

Yesterday’s hearing featured FCC Commissioners on a partisan griddle as members of Congress asked softball questions of those they favored, and strafed the ones they don’t with long-winded lectures.

Republican members had no time for stories of Providers Gone Wild, particularly Comcast’s secret squeeze of its customers’ broadband speeds when running peer-to-peer software.  Such stories conflict with their talking point world view that broadband from the private sector should be run any damn way they please.  When some go to far, “they are isolated incidents” claimed Republican members, to the nodding affirmation of the two Republican commissioners.

Julius Genachowski was reduced to defending his homeopathic net regulations as a regulatory “light touch” — like a dew kissed raspberry on a summer morning.  But representing regulation as harmless didn’t do him any favors, because he forgot his audience.

Drive-by Hearing: For much of the hearing, C-SPAN cameras caught most of the seats empty as members came and went.

No argument about moderated government regulation is ever going to fly in a room with members like Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) who spent her five minutes of talk time scorching the FCC for holding up the Comcast-NBC merger with questions.  How. dare. they.

Congressional hearings used to be about fact finding and allowing members to educate themselves on the issues before casting their votes.  No more.  These days, hearings are an exchange of preconceived talking points as members switch between grilling or ignoring the witnesses they don’t like while fawning over those they do.

GigaOm called the entire affair “nauseating” and helpfully condensed the only three things you need to take from the hearings:

• FCC Chairman Genachowski said the Level 3 and Comcast debate over access to Comcast’s last mile subscribers is a business issue and not a net neutrality issue.
• FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell resurrected the ghost of unlicensed white spaces and set it up as a competitive threat to existing ISPs. He then used that threat of eventual competition to argue we no longer need net neutrality rules. I tend to agree that if we had robust broadband competition, we wouldn’t need network neutrality, but according to McDowell, white spaces aren’t dead. If they aren’t dead, that’s important.
• The FCC will keep the docket open on its effort to reclassify broadband, which would give the FCC the legal authority under existing laws regulate broadband as a transportation service (the so-called Title II authority). This is a good thing for network neutrality fans, as the existing net neutrality rules will likely be challenged in court, and keeping that docket open leaves a back door for the FCC to implement rules. However, the industry hates the idea of reclassification and will fight it tooth and nail. It also means more hearings, comments and arguments over the entire issue.

Contrast this with more than a week of hearings in Canada on usage-based billing.  The differences are nothing less than striking.  Members attending those hearings were well-informed about most of the issues surrounding the usage-based billing debate and aside from the occasional minor grandstanding and long-winded questions, got to the bottom of the issues at hand and were prepared to challenge assertions made in all sides of the debate.  They even pronounced everything correctly.  A 10 minute exchange over the pricing formulas for Bell’s wholesale Gateway Access Service (GAS) probably won’t get you a soundbite on the evening news, but it will enlighten a member of Parliament about just how unjustified these pricing schemes are.

Not so in Washington, where net policy nuance is a French word meaning “weakness” or “socialist takeover.”

Bell Canada must surely wish they lived in a country where the hired help in Congress can reflexively support whatever is on the company’s agenda… for the right price.  For the moment, they are stuck exchanging Valentines with their close friends at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, most of whom came from the industry they now regulate.

Minutes after Washington’s hearings ended, several Republicans, with their minds already made up, introduced a Joint Resolution to override the FCC’s authority on Net Neutrality and sweep the free and open Internet into a dustbin.  There are new owners of the Internet in town and it’s past time you got used to it — they are AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast.  Your bill is in the mail.  You can thank us now or later.

Congress' Joint Resolution requires a simple majority -and- the President's signature to pass. Ironically, the Republicans touted the measure as "filibuster-proof," but considering the president is likely to veto it, a filibuster is the least of their problems.

Here we go again.

You always know when a new year has arrived when another North Carolina legislator files a Big Telecom industry-written bill attacking community-owned broadband.

This year, the laughably-named “Act to Protect Jobs and Investment by Regulating Local Government Competition With Private Business” comes courtesy of Rep. Marilyn Avila (R-Wake County), a former manager of the conservative think tank John Locke Foundation.

H.129 is remarkable for its legislative micro-management, coming from someone who claims to oppose big government meddling.

Among its requirements:

• Demands a public accounting for every community broadband network;
• Limitations on service to strict city boundaries;
• Prohibits contractual agreements with apartment and condo building owners that mandate municipal service for individual residents;
• Bans advertising and “promotion” of community-owned broadband networks on Public, Education, and Government access channels;
• Shall not price any component of its service below cost;
• Requires payment of a special tax equal to the amount of local property taxes and/or fees normally exempted for local government enterprises;
• Requires permission through an extended hearing process to win permission before delivering service to any area deemed “unserved”;
• Demands a laundry list of pre-conditions before obtaining permission to shop for financing.

Avila

Avila doesn’t mind putting government all over the backs of community-owned networks if they happen to compete with her friends at AT&T, Time Warner, and CenturyLink.

Let’s review this exceptionally provider-friendly piece of protectionist legislation.

First, Avila’s demand for an open accounting of community broadband projects provides a treasure trove of business intelligence for any competitor.  They can demand to open the books and gain critical subscriber information — what residents pay for service, who gets the service, and how much it costs to provide.  That’s pure gold for targeted marketing campaigns to win back customers with special offers municipal providers are banned from offering.

We’re calling a foul ball because Avila’s “fair and level playing field” doesn’t have room for fair play.  Private providers get to keep the secrets community-owned network are forced to reveal.  That, by design, puts municipalities at a competitive disadvantage and could help drive them out of business.  Remember, these networks are financed by privately obtained bonds, not taxpayer dollars.  Shouldn’t any such provider have the right to keep its business strategies secret?

Second, if banning mandatory service for renters and condo owners is such a great idea, why does Avila only limit it to community-owned networks?  The record is clear — private providers are increasingly signing agreements with property owners mandating cable television fees for residents.  Apparently Avila’s concept of fairness doesn’t include the actual companies found guilty of raising the rent.

Third, Avila bends over backwards for her cable and phone friends by tying the hands of municipal providers who want their networks to be commercially successful.  Time Warner has no problem injecting endless promotions for its own services not just on a handful of channels, but on virtually every channel on the lineup, often during nearly every commercial break.  Can municipal networks ban advertising from AT&T and Time Warner?  Of course not.  And the definition of “promotion” specified in Avila’s ad ban is vague.  If a town government meeting talks up the success of a community-owned network, has Avila’s law been broken?  Apparently censorship by government mandate is a-OK as long as it doesn’t target her Big Telecom friends.

Avila’s ban on setting pricing below cost is another giveaway to Time Warner and AT&T, who routinely deliver retention and new customer promotions that could be temporarily priced below cost to secure or maintain a customer relationship for a limited period of time.  Of course, Avila doesn’t require either company to open their books to find out exactly what it costs companies to provide these special pricing packages.  No municipal provider seeks to price service at a rate that puts the project out of business.  Time Warner Cable has been accused of delivering below-cost retention pricing to departing customers in Wilson, where GreenLight has been poaching the cable company’s customers for more than a year.  Avila’s hand-tying provision allows some companies in the marketplace to keep pricing flexibility while the municipal provider is forced to price service according to a state-dictated formula.  John Locke would be turning over in his grave if he heard about this planned economy-pricing.

Rep. Avila can certainly no longer claim to be for low taxes, because her bill would effectively raise them for community-owned networks.  Again, since these projects are almost always funded from private bond markets, not public tax dollars, slapping complicated tax formulas on municipal providers while continuing to permit special tax break deals for private companies (such as “payment in lieu of taxes” or special tax breaks/grants for Time Warner in return for job creation) shouldn’t work for most small government conservatives.  Shouldn’t they support lower taxes for everyone?  Instead, Avila seeks to hamper community network business models by punitively sticking them with taxes she would otherwise oppose for commercial providers.

Avila’s support for smaller, less regulatory-minded government must also be called into question with this bill’s ridiculously complicated regulations for serving unserved areas of the state (which also grants a special window to private providers to protest, which they will certainly do in just about any area of the state even partially suitable for a future project).  Her bill even demands 60-day delays, custom-tailored to allow industry lobbyists to gin up opposition and demagogue projects.  Since a commission will be involved in the decision making process and has to take into account opposition from private providers, all of the benefits of Avila’s legislation flow to the cable and phone industry, none to community-owned networks or individual consumers that will ultimately benefit from better service at lower prices.

Avila's idea of a level-playing field.

Avila destroys her own “level playing field” argument in language within her own bill:

“The city or joint agency making the application to the Commission shall bear the burden of persuasion.”

In other words, Avila offers a “level playing field” with an 11-foot electrified barbed wire fence surrounding it.  Unfortunately, municipalities won’t be the only ones shocked by Avila’s cable and phone company protectionism.

Ordinary consumers in communities like Wilson, exempted from the relentless annual rate hikes from Time Warner because of the presence of a municipal competitor won’t get to keep the savings if Avila has anything to say about it.  She wants you to pay full price for your cable service, and pay higher prices year after year.

Her claim that the legislation will somehow “protect jobs and investment” is specious at best.  Time Warner has not exited Wilson or Salisbury — two cities with a community-owned competitor.  In fact, Time Warner is on record welcoming competition.  In reality, these companies simply don’t welcome new choices from those providers that will actually deliver savings and better service to customers.

This anti consumer legislation brought to you by Time Warner Cable...

The cable industry’s flagellation against projects like GreenLight and Fibrant flips between calling them financial boondoggles not worth bothering about to unfair competition that will harm private investment.  AT&T’s protests, in particular, ring the most hollow.  This is the same company that wants deregulation to make it easier for new players like themselves to enter the marketplace.  Their U-verse service enjoys the benefits of statewide video franchising, which removes accountability to local governments.  Yet this same company lobbies for increased bureaucracy and regulation for some of their potential competitors.  Avila is only too happy to oblige.

As with every other piece of legislation we’ve seen on this subject from North Carolina, it’s yet another custom-written favor to big cable and phone companies and an attack on consumer interests across the state.  Generous campaign contributions from the telecom industry pay off only too well when state legislators allow these companies to write the bills designed to protect their turf.

For Time Warner Cable, the costs associated with sending selected legislators and their families to a recent delicious BBQ event in sunny San Diego to attend a sham “conference” sponsored by a corporate front group shows there are plenty of favors to be had all around, just as long as you support the company’s legislative agenda.

...and AT&T

Fighting this year’s anti-consumer legislation will be tougher than ever.  For the first time in 112 years, the corporate friendly North Carolina Republican party won control of the General Assembly.  For many members, the free market can do no wrong and anything government touches is bad news.  Many will reflexively support Avila’s legislation.  But any underserved county in the state knows the truth about today’s broadband in rural North Carolina — if local communities can’t step up and deliver the service, nobody will.  For these representatives, Democrat or Republican, concern should run high that Avila’s bill assures these areas of years of high prices, poor or no service, and status quo protection designed to keep the market exactly as it is today.  Considering how poorly North Carolina stands in national broadband rankings, standing still should never be an option.

During the third day of hearings on usage-based billing, Mirko Bibic from Bell admitted that usage-based billing “prevents [other ISPs] from differentiating their offers from our own.”

That remarkable admission is exactly what independent Internet Service Providers have been arguing since the issue of wholesale usage-based billing was first proposed by Canada’s largest broadband supplier.

Independent providers have managed to carve out a niche supplying primarily residential DSL customers with flat rate usage plans, made possible because of wholesale access provisions assured under Canada’s telecommunications regulations.  As Bell, Rogers, Shaw, and Videotron have systematically imposed usage limits on their residential customers (and occasionally lowered them), consumers seeking better value have found it from smaller ISPs that still offer unlimited access.

As Bell frets over its inability to reap retail revenue from customers departing for other providers, the idea of imposing usage-based billing on wholesale accounts ends that revenue erosion once and for all.  As Bell admits, it forces every provider in Canada to charge the same high prices they do for Internet access.

Canada’s telecom regulator, the CRTC, still cannot define what a “heavy user” is, and neither could Bibic.  But with these pricing schemes, now they don’t have to.  Imposing higher prices with vague promises that the resulting revenue will expand Canada’s broadband networks is eerily familiar to what Time Warner promised residents in several major cities, and then didn’t deliver.

In western New York, the cable company promised a new generation of blazing fast speeds on a world class broadband network, as long as customers agreed to pay up to $150 for unlimited residential service per month.  The old price was $50.  But the cable company provided those upgrades in other cities instead — without usage based pricing.  No wonder residents were furious.  After two weeks of protest, Time Warner threw in the towel.

Two years later, the promised upgrades are finally slated to arrive, long after being made available in most large cities in New York State.

Provider-promised bait and switch broadband upgrades merely represent sucker bets, and no one except the provider wins.

If Bell gets its way, there will be no reason for anyone to do business with an independent service provider.  They’ll be forced to charge increased prices, sometimes even higher than Bell itself.

Bell is pulling out all the stops trying to defend its justification for Internet Overcharging through so-called usage-based billing.  In a published debate between the telecom giant and TekSavvy — a small independent ISP trying to preserve flat rate broadband service in Canada, Bell claims Canadian broadband is the third best in the world, ahead of the United States, all of Europe, and just barely trailing Japan and Korea:

At the same time, Canada has increasingly become a world leader when it comes to broadband. When it comes to actual download speeds, Canada ranks third in the G20, behind only densely populated Korea and Japan. And prices are low — in fact, for higher-speed services, lower than in both the U.S. and Japan.

Michael Geist, a popular columnist fighting against Canadian Internet Overcharging, scoffs at the notion:

I’m not sure where these claims come from – Canada does not appear in the top 10 on Akamai’s latest State of the Internet report for Internet speed and no Canadian city makes Akamai’s top 100 for peak speed. The OECD report ranks Canada well back in terms of speed and price as does the Berkman report.  The NetIndex report ranks Canada 36th in the world for residential speed. Moreover, the shift away from the OECD to the G20 has the effect of excluding many developed countries with faster and cheaper broadband than Canada (while bringing in large, developing world economies that unsurprisingly rank below Canada on these issues). While there is probably a report somewhere that validates the claim, the consensus is that Canada is not a leader.

Bell’s Magic Pony-stories are at best exaggerated and at worst, phoney-baloney from the telco’s government relations department.

Stop the Cap! compared prices across several providers and found no value for money in broadband plans from all of the country’s major phone and cable companies.  Without fail, all were heavily usage limited, most throttled broadband speeds for peer-to-peer applications, engaged in overlimit fees the credit card industry would be proud to charge, and simply were almost always behind their counterparts to the south — in the United States.  In fact, some consumers are importing their broadband from the USA when they can manage it.

“Bell can’t win the argument on the merits, so it is making things up,” writes London, Ontario resident Hugh MacDonald.  “I have had Bell DSL for years now, and there isn’t anything fast or cheap about it.”

MacDonald’s broadband service from Bell tops out at around 4Mbps.

Mirko Bibic, senior vice-president for regulatory and government affairs at Bell claims consumers have to pay more to fund infrastructure expansion, and even challenges our long-standing assertion that telephone network comparisons don’t apply:

Bell provides all our customers with the best possible Internet experience available — the result of heavy and ongoing investment to expand our network capacity both to meet fast-growing demand and to manage the congestion that threatens everyone’s Internet experience.

Internet congestion is a fact and it cannot be wished away. Network providers like Bell must, like hydro utilities, build our networks to handle the heaviest usage times, not just an average of usage over time. At 8:30 in the evening, demand is at its absolute peak. And we have to deliver based on the volume at that time.

Keeping up with growing volume obviously means these network investments are not one-time costs. Between 2006 and 2009, Internet usage more than doubled, and Bell has invested more than $8-billion in the last five years in network growth and enhancement to keep pace. Yet at the same time, the CRTC has found that the average price per gigabyte downloaded has actually declined by 20%.

That’s why the long distance analogy, so often used by those with an interest in confusing the issue, is fundamentally misleading. In the case of long distance, it’s the simple transmission of voice over long-established legacy networks.

But Bibic ignores several important facts and doesn’t disclose others:

What broadband network does not have to make regular investments to expand to meet demand?  Cable and telephone company DSL business models, in place for at least a decade, priced network expansion, infrastructure return on investment, and data transmission into pricing formulas.  While data demands are increasing, the costs to meet those demands are, as Bell openly admits, declining.

What amount of revenue and profit has been earned from selling broadband service to Canadian consumers and the wholesale market and how does that compare to the dollar amount invested?  Bell Canada’s financial report for the third quarter of 2010 shows the company will earn an estimated $3.5 billion in revenue from its broadband Internet division alone.  Bell’s capital spending numbers also include network investments for its fiber to the neighborhood service, Fibe.  Bell’s revenue from selling the video side of that service were on track to deliver an additional $1.5 billion in revenue in 2010.  Not including the enormous wholesale broadband market, Bell will earn at least $5 billion a year from its broadband division.

In fact, Bell’s financial report also openly admits much of its capital spending increases have been spent on deploying its IPTV network Fibe in Ontario and Quebec, not on Internet backbone traffic management.

What are some of Bell’s biggest risks to a happy-clappy shareholder report for investors next quarter?  To quote:

• “Our ability to implement our strategies and plans in order to produce the expected benefits;
• Our ability to continue to implement our cost reduction initiatives and contain capital intensity;
• The potential adverse effects on our Internet and wireless businesses of the significant increase in broadband demand;
• Our ability to discontinue certain traditional services as necessary to improve capital and operating efficiencies;
• Regulatory initiatives or proceedings, litigation and changes in laws or regulations.”

Bibic

As for Bell’s claims about the “long distance analogy,” it’s only slightly ironic that a telecommunications company considers today’s voice networks radically different from data networks.  Analog transmission of voice calls went the way of the telegraph around a decade ago, with the last analog, step-by-step telephone switch in North America in Nantes, Quebec switched off in late 2001.  Today, telephone traffic is digital data, no different than any other kind of data transported across the country.

Bell cannot afford to have comparisons made between the telephone company’s move towards flat rate billing for phone calls and their broadband service moving away from it, because it torpedoes their entire argument.

Bibic then argues UBB is the right way to go because… major providers already charge it:

UBB has been the established framework for Internet services in Canada for years. Bell, for example, offers standard Internet service packages ranging from 25 gigabytes up to 75 gigabytes per month. As well, customers can sign up for 40 GB more for $5 per month, 80 GB for $10 or a whopping 120 GB more for $15. Keep in mind that 120 GB will get you 600 hours of standard definition video streaming or 100 hours of HD video streaming.

Not a bad deal when you consider average usage on our network is 16 GB per month and half of our customer base uses just five GB a month.

Most Canadians don’t see the “good deal” Bell says they will get from dramatically increased broadband prices. In fact, polls reveal the only groups in Canada that support such pricing are Big Telecom executives and the CRTC.

A new Angus Reid/Toronto Star poll illustrates what we’ve found to be true wherever ripoff “usage-based” pricing appears: people despise it, no matter how much Internet they use:

In the online survey of a representative national sample of 1,024 Canadian adults, three-in-four respondents (76%) disagree with the recent decision from the Canada Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), which set the stage to eliminate unlimited use plans.

Bibic can relax as long as the current panel of commissioners at the CRTC, largely drawn from telecommunications companies, remain in place.  They continue to agree with Bell’s point of view and ignore the citizens they are supposed to represent.

Just shy of one month after adoption, the Federal Communication Commission’s Net Neutrality rules face a legal challenge by one of the parties that helped write them.

Verizon Communications filed suit Thursday in the same federal court that in April threw out much of the authority the FCC thought it had over online telecommunications.

“We are deeply concerned by the FCC’s assertion of broad authority for sweeping new regulation of broadband networks and the Internet itself,” said Michael E. Glover, Verizon’s senior vice president and deputy general counsel. “We believe this assertion of authority goes well beyond any authority provided by Congress, and creates uncertainty for the communications industry, innovators, investors and consumers.”

Verizon’s lead attorney in the case in Helgi Walker, who will be a familiar face in the court — Walker successfully argued the original case Comcast brought against the Commission for trying to regulate its Internet service.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski's cowardly cave-in on strong Net Neutrality was rewarded with... a lawsuit from Verizon to overturn the regulations the company helped write.

But Verizon wants an even greater shot at success, asking for the same panel of judges who ruled in the Comcast case to also hear its challenge.

“Verizon has made a blatant attempt to locate its challenge in a favorable appeals court forum,” said Andrew Jay Schwartzman, senior vice president and policy director of the Media Access Project.

Outgunned.  Again.

The earlier decision in the Comcast case not only stripped the FCC’s authority to regulate broadband under a regulatory framework established under the Bush Administration, it derided the logic behind it.  During arguments, the FCC’s general counsel acknowledged he was likely to lose the case, and actually asked the Court for guidance on how to write better rules.

Remarkably, Verizon’s legal challenge comes after the company worked closely with the Commission to moderate Net Neutrality regulations.  The rules issued in December exempted wireless communications and were criticized by consumer groups for not truly representing a free and open Internet.

Rob Pegoraro, a Washington Post columnist, was incredulous the phone company was spending subscribers’ money fighting net policies that nearly mirrored the voluntary agreement it reached with Google last year.

“Okay, so you’re going to spend some of my money to fight a minimal set of regulations written to stop you from tampering with my Internet access? How is that supposed to make me feel comfortable doing business with you?

“(Note to Verizon: You are not only an enormous telecom conglomerate, you are The Phone Company. You don’t get to say “trust me.”)

“Then I got more annoyed.

“The regulations that Verizon regards as an affront to the Constitution match up closely with the proposal that Verizon published with Google in August–a suggested regulatory framework that many people, myself included, criticized for its minimal restrictions on wireless broadband services.

[…] “And not only did Verizon think that its proposed set of rules would be good for business last summer, it did so as recently as 2:25 p.m. Thursday, when a post on its public-policy blog favorably cited those suggestions.”

Nate Anderson at Ars Technica isn’t sure why Verizon is spending time fighting rules it supposedly agrees with either, and he produced a chart proving it:

Excerpted below are the main Verizon/Google provisions, followed by their matching item in the FCC’s “open Internet” order from December. All are exact quotes.

Despite the perceived rush to court, legal challenges against the FCC’s Net Neutrality rules were widely expected.  The FCC continues to tell the press (on background), it believes it has the authority to enact Internet-related regulations and policies.  But many court watchers familiar with the District of Columbia Court of Appeals think it is more likely than not Verizon will prevail on similar legal arguments Comcast used to win its case.

What then?

Pegoraro: “I’d like to think that it would be fitting if the FCC responded by returning to the regulatory strategy it should have adopted in the first place: putting broadband Internet services back under a simplified form of the “Title II” common-carrier regulation that most operated under until 2005.”

“But if the FCC couldn’t find the gumption to choose that more aggressive but more legally grounded option before, why would it now?”