FCC Finally Admits That Rolling Deadline Equals No Deadline At All

from the no,-seriously? dept

While it's nice that the FCC can be flexible after presenting outrageous demands of companies, it certainly does make them look pretty silly. When the FCC got tough on VoIP 911 service, they set up two deadlines. The first, in July, was to have all VoIP providers get proactive confirmation from every customer that VoIP 911 service was different than regular 911 service. Of course, as the "deadline" approached and the FCC realized that thousands of VoIP customers were going to be cut off for no clear reason (potentially making them even less safe), they backed down and delayed the deadline a month. A month goes by... and they delayed the deadline again. Another month? Another delay. If you hadn't figured it out by now, it appears that no one takes the FCC very seriously on this sort of thing, so it should come as no surprise that, today, they meekly ditched the deadline completely, and simply asked for VoIP providers to report on their progress on the matter. However, in an effort to appears to still have a spine, the FCC added a condition: VoIP providers can no longer sell in markets where they don't offer E911 service, even if they offer perfectly valid 911 service. This, despite, continually rolling over for the mobile phone industry whenever it has requested (and, boy has it requested it often) delays in requiring E911 service.