The Senate Commerce Committee will finally hold its
oversight hearing on the FCC's national broadband plan on Apr. 14.
The delay in the hearing, which was rescheduled from March
23, will give the committee the chance to talk to the lone witness, FCC Chairman
Julius Genachowski, about the FCC's authority over broadband in the wake of
last week's court decision vacating the commission's BitTorrent decision
involving Comcast network management.
The court said the FCC had not justified its baseline statutory
authority for holding that Comcast's impeding of BitTorrent's peer-to-peer file
sharing service violated its internet openness guidelines.
Genachowski has said the FCC still has the authority to
implement the plan, but it will need to clarify where that comes from to the
court's satisfaction for some of its proposals.
