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Mar. 6, 2009

According to various reports, House telecom subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher has made plans to put together another wireless consumer protection bill in 2009, an effort likely to reignite an old debate over the role of states in a new national regulatory framework.

Meanwhile, the GAO (Government Accounting Office) is conducting interviews with the goal of issuing a report later this year on wireless service quality.

In recent years, House and Senate lawmakers have long pursued a variety of wireless consumer protection bills, with the issue of state jurisdiction a flashpoint in the proposals.

Boucher described the yet-to-be-written wireless consumer bill as a long-term objective aimed at updating similar legislation drafted in 2008 by Rep. Edward Markey, who relinquished his long-held chairmanship of the telecom panel to lead the Commerce subcommittee on energy and the environment.

The Markey draft directed the FCC to develop a national policy for wireless consumer protection that states would enforce, but stopped short of eviscerating a provision in a 1993 law that reserved to states oversight of terms and conditions of commercial mobile service.

Boucher told Congress Daily AM, a publication of the National Journal “a set of national standards for consumer protection for the users of cellular telephone services would be a key component of the measure. The standards have to be very meaningful.”

However, a wireless consumer bill co-sponsored by Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller doesn't preempt state regulation of wireless providers.

In contrast, a bill championed by Mark Pryor would do just that as part of a new federal wireless consumer protection regime. As such, the mobile-phone industry has supported Pryor’s approach over others to date.

As a whole, consumer and public-interest groups want to see states remain in a position to step in when consumers lodge complaints about wireless and mobile service and business practices of service providers.

But state regulators have various differences over precisely how much power they should wield if national consumer protection guidelines were adopted.

So far, it's still unclear as to what extent Boucher will draw on the Markey draft as he attempts to put his on thinking on wireless consumer protection legislation.

Boucher’s spokesperson wasn't immediately available for comment.

Any move to change wireless consumer protection laws likely will not play out significantly until September or October of this year, given other legislative priorities.

One such priority is so-called "universal service fund reform" and it happens to be at the top on Boucher’s agenda for the next 6 weeks.

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Source: The House Telecom Subcommittee.