FCC Ready to Lift Rate-Filing Requirement

In one of the first major deregulatory acts stemming from the enactment last month of the telecommunications reform bill, regulators signaled Thursday that they intend to free long-distance carriers from being required to file their rates with the Federal Communications Commission.

Although the proposed change would not require the agency to relinquish its authority to oversee long-distance rates, some critics said ending the filings would reduce the FCC’s ability to police long-distance prices.

FCC officials argued that if rates were not publicly filed, long-distance carriers would feel pressure to hold them to a minimum, lest they be undercut by their competitors. Moreover, the long-distance companies could cut their rates more quickly in response to competition.

In addition, the FCC officials said, cutting the regulatory red tape would spare the nation’s 500-odd long-distance carriers from having to file about 4 million pages of telephone price lists a year.

Bradley Stillman, executive director of the Consumer Federation of America, a Washington-based watchdog group, was not convinced that the new actions were adequate.

“The notion, somehow, that eliminating [rate] filings is going to lead to more vigorous competition in markets that the telephone companies already claim are vigorously competitive seems misguided,” Stillman said. “What’s in place to protect consumers?”

“It is essential that we focus our limited resources on promoting competition where it does not yet exist rather than policing competition where it does,” FCC Commissioner Susan Ness said.

Representatives of some big-business telephone users took the middle ground, saying the FCC currently does not have sufficient staff to comb through the huge volume of tariffs, which mostly serve to give advance price change warnings to rivals.

“As a practical matter, there has been little review of tariffs,” said Ellen Block, a Washington communications lawyer who represents large business telephone users.

“One major effect on the marketplace of tariff filing,” she added, “was simply to make a carrier’s prices public to its competitors, with each knowing exactly what the [other] is charging. That kind of situation tends to encourage collusion in pricing.”

The FCC first voted to eliminate the filing of telephone tariffs by nondominant carriers in the early 1980s. But the U.S. Supreme Court held that the commission did not have the statutory authority to do away with tariffs, which have been a fixture of FCC regulation since the enactment of the Communications Act of 1934.

That prohibition was overcome this year with the passage of the sweeping telecom reform law, which, among other things, gave the FCC the authority to eliminate tariffs.

Several long-distance carriers applauded the agency’s decision to seek elimination of the tariff-filing requirements.

AT&T; Corp. “strongly supports the FCC’s latest step to remove regulations that are superseded by the competition in the marketplace,” the company said in a statement. “ . . . The telecommunications service and equipment markets are both fiercely competitive, and no company has the power to dominate.”