USA: The Chairman of the FTC says it will have a role in the regulation of broadband services

[multichannel] Federal Trade Commission Chairman Jon Leibowitz said Friday he has no problem with charging more for higher speeds or heavy usage, as long as the bill does not come as a surprise.

Leibowitz also confirms that Google is being investigated for violating the prohibition on interlocking board members, but says that he does not think its dominance of search automatically equates to anticompetitive practice and doesn't think it is abusing its power.

Saying he was speaking for himself, Leibowtiz said in an interview on C-SPAN's Communicators series Friday: "I think it is reasonable to charge more for higher speeds. And if someone is using a lot of bandwidth, like for instance college students on campuses for downloading pirated movies all the time, it's not unreasonable to charge more for them."

But he emphasized that the key was information. "You have to do it in the context of giving them notice so that they can consent to it," he told an interviewer on Communicators. "You can't surprise someone with a bill that is 10 times as much as what they expected. That seems to be to me deceptive and unfair."

Leibowitz said that, in terms of consumer protection, he thought the Federal Communications Commission had a big role to play in issues of broadband network management and neutrality. He said the FTC may weigh in on the FCC's notice of inquiry on its grand broadband rollout plan. He said broadband was a deregulated industry, which was a good thing, but that you needed law enforcement to make sure that people were doing the right thing.

But he also said he was hoping that both sides of the network-neutrality debate were racheting down the rhetoric. He pointed to a couple of years ago when both sides painted pictures of "dystopian nightmares" if the other sides position prevailed. It would be useful, he said, to tone down that rhetoric and perhaps come ot an agreement. He said he thought both sides were already moving in the right direction.

FTC Chair OK With Paying For Higher-Speed Broadband