What the Internet Did Over Summer Vacation
By Catherine Sansum Kirkman
Unlike many of its enthusiasts, the Internet did not go on vacation this summer. While you were (hopefully) swimming in the ocean or boating on the lake, a number of hot topics came to a boil on the legal front: a choking regulatory scheme proposed by your local telephone company to assess per-minute long-distance charges for Internet usage; proposed federal legislation to regulate spamming; the ongoing controversy over who should be entitled to register domain names; and a bid by industry giants to capture the so-called privacy market.
No Internet Long-Distance Charges
Your local telephone company recently lost out in its efforts to bill your Internet account for long-distance charges. The local exchange carriers (LECs) were very worried about the network congestion you might experience while surfing the Internet. To help you, they wanted to raise the rates for Internet usage of the public switched network. The LECs petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a change in the pricing structure that they are allowed to charge Internet service providers (ISPs). The FCC ruled, however, that the LECs will not be permitted to impose interstate per-minute access charges on ISPs. So for now, at least, these charges will not be passed on to you, although the LECs will probably make a play at the state level.
Back in 1983, long before most could foresee the Internet explosion, the FCC decided that ISPs could use LEC facilities to originate and terminate interstate calls without paying interstate access charges.
