Alarm monitoring company ADT LLC told FCC’s Wireline Competition Bureau staff and advisers to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and Commissioners Mignon L. Clyburn and Brendan Carr that the agency “could rely on Section 275 [alarm monitoring services] of the Communications Act to provide ancillary jurisdiction to adopt core net neutrality rules barring blocking, throttling or anticompetitive prioritization by broadband providers offering competitive alarm monitoring services.”

In the presentation slides accompanying the ex parte notice describing the Oct. 12 meetings with staff, ADT said that this is “[n]ot just a theoretical problem. As examples, BIAS [broadband Internet access service] providers blocked ADT’s alarm data on at least four occasion[s] over the past year.” It noted that section 275 requires incumbent local exchange carriers that provide alarm monitoring services to “provide non-affiliate entities, upon reasonable request, with the network services it provides to its own alarm monitoring operations, on nondiscriminatory terms and conditions.”

ADT argued that section 275 “confers ancillary jurisdiction to protect [the] alarm industry.”  It said it “supports light touch regulation” and sees “no need to classify BIAS as a Title II [common carrier] service” because “[a]ncillary jurisdiction assumes information services [Title I] classification for BIAS.”

“Ancillary jurisdiction based on section 275 would only … apply [to] alarm monitoring services,” ADT said. —Lynn Stanton, lynn.stanton@wolterskluwer.com

Courtesy TRDaily