Business

A high wire act

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski yesterday brought his pitch to regulate the Internet directly into the belly of the beast, defending his plan to police Web providers before a tough crowd of cable-industry execs and vowing to take a mostly hands-off approach.

Genachowski, speaking yesterday at the cable industry’s annual conference in Los Angeles, attempted to tamp down some of the biggest worries to surface since he revealed last week that he was drawing up new ways to oversee the Internet after losing a high-profile case earlier this year.

The FCC boss insisted that the agency would not try to regulate pricing or force cable and phone companies to share their networks with rivals.

“Nothing changes one iota in terms of the policy goals and outcomes the commission and I have been clearly articulating transparently for months now,” he told the audience.

Genachowski’s proposal seeks to use decades-old phone rules to reclassify Internet access as a “telecommunications service” subject to FCC oversight. However, he said he would not impose harsh restrictions and declared price controls “off the table.”

Company executives are concerned the that FCC’s “light touch” approach eventually will give way to heavier-handed regulations that would interfere with pricing, competition and product offerings.

Investors share those concerns, weighing down stocks of cable providers Comcast, Cablevision and Time Warner Cable.

Genachowski said his proposal was necessary after a court decision played havoc with the agency’s ability to prevent Internet service providers from blocking or discriminating against Internet users.

An appeals court found that the FCC lacked the legal authority to sanction Comcast, the nation’s biggest cable operator, for blocking heavy broadband users of file-sharing site BitTorrent.

Genachowski’s plan has reignited the debate over “net neutrality,” the idea that Internet service providers should treat all traffic as equal and not discriminate against content or users.

While Internet giants such as Google and Amazon have lobbied the FCC to ensure they have equal access to the Web infrastructure, the cable and phone companies have argued it would harm their ability to invest and innovate.

Genachowki told cable execs yesterday that his plan isn’t about helping Google or any other net neutrality proponents get a leg up on their cable competition.

“This issue isn’t about Google,” Genachowski said. “It’s about the next Google, the next eBay, and the next Amazon.”

The FCC chairman said his mission is to drive broadband adoption, a goal that he articulated from the beginning. He cited studies showing the US lags other countries in broadband access and said that could hurt the nation’s ability to be competitive on a global basis. With Post wires

holly.sanders@nypost.com