Internet Surfers Get Fcc Support

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission is promising consumers that a pending decision won’t lead to charges by the minute for connecting to the Internet by phone.

“The FCC has no intention of permitting per-minute charges to be imposed on the Internet,” the agency’s chairman, Bill Kennard, said Friday in a statement.

Kennard’s comments respond to a joint filing on Thursday by the Consumers Union and the Consumer Federation of America. They contend that people could one day end up paying per-minute charges for Internet use if the commission decides to treat calls to the Internet as interstate communications.

But Kennard said the FCC has no intention of repealing an existing provision that exempts Internet service providers, such as America Online, “from paying per-minute charges to local telephone companies. This is one of the great enduring urban myths,” he said.

The commission isn’t expected to issue a decision on whether to treat Internet dialups as local or interstate calls for a couple of weeks.

Kennard said a FCC decision on the matter, however, “has nothing to do with consumer Internet charges. It’s about what telephone companies pay one another.”