The FCC has stepped into the fray of government authorities looking to shut down mobile services in the interest of public safety. This follows the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) shutdown of mobile cellphone service to prevent protests against a police action.
“Any interruption of wireless services raises serious legal and policy issues, and must meet a very high bar,” said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. “The FCC, as the agency with oversight of our communications networks, is committed to preserving their availability and openness, and to harnessing communications technologies to protect the public.”
“The same wireless network that police see as a tool for rioters to coordinate is the same wireless network used by peaceful protesters to exercise our fundamental freedoms,” said Harold Feld, the legal director for Public Knowledge. “More than that, in any event, the network will be necessary for people in the area to call for help or to let family members know they are not harmed.”
“What BART did clearly violated the First Amendment . . . But we need a court to say so, not the FCC,” said Larry Downes, TechFreedom’s senior adjunct fellow, and Berin Szoka, TechFreedom’s founder and president. “The state did not order the shutdown of the network, nor does the state run the network. BART simply turned off equipment it doesn’t own—a likely violation of its contractual obligations to the carriers. But BART did nothing that violated FCC rules governing network operators. To declare the local government an ‘agent’ of the carriers would set an extremely dangerous precedent for an agency with a long track record of regulatory creep.”
Source: AdWeek
