Verizon responded to a NY consumer Freedom of Information Act request with 300 Blacked-out Pages on Voice Link Deployments

“You are telling me that among the 300 pages nothing was made available?” Robert Freeman, executive director of the Committee On Open Government, asked incredulously”

Elise Ackerman tells the story in Forbes:

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In September, a group of consumer advocates interceded in a proceeding Verizon had initiated with the New York Public Service Commission to shut down its traditional network, known as the “wireline” network. The advocates were interested in reviewing documents Verizon had filed with the commission about its wireline and wireless build-outs.

Under the state Freedom of Information Law, advocates requested that Verizon provide information about the actual costs and expenses associated with the repair, upkeep and maintenance of the traditional wireline network on the resort community of Fire Island. Among other things, advocates also wanted to know the location of any planned or active offering of Verizon’s wireless Voice Link service in other parts of New York.

Voice Link became contentious earlier this year when Verizon proposed to replace its badly damaged, traditional network with Voice Link on Fire Island and in other communities affected by Hurricane Sandy. Residents vociferously objected, winning support from advocacy groups, the state attorney general and Verizon’s own unionized employees. Verizon ended up agreeing to provide Fire Island with high-speed, fiber optic-based broadband service known as FiOS, as well as the wireless service.

It was a happy ending for Fire Island residents, but advocates believe the battle over replacing the traditional phone network in the rest of the country is just beginning. “The fact of the matter is for telephone customers throughout Verizon’s territory and especially in New York, Verizon is using both appropriate and inappropriate means to get people off the wireline system and onto wireless,” said Richard Brodsky, an attorney representing Common Cause New York, the Communication Workers of America, Region 1, Consumers Union and the Fire Island Association.

Verizon responded to the advocate’s Freedom of Information request with more than 300 fully redacted pages. Among other documents, Verizon claimed as a “trade secret” a list of Voice Link deployments, a Voice Link leader’s guide and a document about overcoming customers’ objections to Voice Link and responding to requests to return to copper.

“You are telling me that among the 300 pages nothing was made available?” Robert Freeman, executive director of the Committee On Open Government, asked incredulously when I contacted him about the Verizon filing. Freeman is an employee of New York’s Department of State, which maintains a special unit for overseeing the Freedom of Information, Open Meetings and Personal Privacy Laws.

Freeman explained that New York’s Court of Appeals has specifically criticized blanket exemptions. As the court ruled in a 1996 case known as Gould versus the New York City Police Department, the Freedom of Information Law imposes a broad duty on government to make records available. All government records are thus “presumptively open for public inspection” unless they fall into specific exemptions which must be “narrowly construed.”

The ruling continues: “In keeping with these settled principles, blanket exemptions for particular types of documents are inimical to the Freedom of Information Law’s policy of open government. Instead, to invoke one of the exemptions of section 87(2), the agency must articulate ‘particularized and specific justification’ for not disclosing requested documents.”

Verizon’s submission is being reviewed by the Office of General Counsel of the New York State Department of Public Service, which is expected to make a determination on Monday whether the records can be withheld under the trade secrets exemption. That decision can then be appealed by either party.

Brodsky says the documents are important in evaluating Verizon’s claims that the copper-wire network is too expensive to maintain. According to sworn testimony made before Congress last week, about 100 million people and millions of small businesses still use the traditional network.

“We believe that Verizon has substantially misstated the economic realities of both the wireline and the wireless service in order to make the wireline service seem economically damaged,” Brodsky said. “And we believe that the wireless service that they want to substitute does not give telephone consumers what they are legally required to get and what they expect.” Specifically, Brodsky said, Voice Link, which continues to be offered to customers in parts of New York and New Jersey, is voice-only, when many customers need both voice and data services.

Verizon disputes these allegations and says their goal all along has been to provide customers with service that is “not only as good, but better than what they had before.”

As the public records battle in New York continues, Harold Feld, senior vice president at Public Knowledge, a consumer advocacy group, said the larger issue is the need for transparency as new IP-based networks roll out around the country. In the past, when the communications industry was dominated by a regulated monopoly, information about the national network was generally available. The absence of competition meant that AT&T couldn’t argue that certain information should be exempt from disclosure because it was proprietary or a trade secret.

“As time has gone by, what we have seen is a shift from a culture that presumes all information about the network will be public to the idea that it is all proprietary and that the public doesn’t have any right to look at it,” Feld said.

Over the years, communications companies have successfully lobbied regulators to reduce the information they collect—and their efforts continue. In mid-October, less than two weeks after submitting its massively redacted response to the advocates’ public information request, Verizon New York asked the state public service commission to slash the amount of information it requires the company to disclose.

“The annual report needs to be subjected to a ‘zero-based’ review,” wrote Joseph Post, deputy general counsel of Verizon New York, in an October 15 filing. Post asked that each of the 85 schedules currently included in the report be examined and eliminated. Particular schedules should only be required if the information they contained was absolutely necessary, couldn’t be obtained through alternative means and didn’t expose Verizon to unfair, competitive disadvantages, he added.

Fred Goldstein, a partner at the Interisle Consulting Group and author of “The Great Telecom Meltdown,” said it makes sense to examine how much information should be collected. But he said New York regulators need to be wary of Verizon’s push to remove all the schedules. Information that would enable adequate oversight is still crucial, Goldstein noted. For example, some of the information that Verizon would like to stop providing could shed light on advocates’ allegations that the company is making the traditional network appear more damaged than it is, in order make the wireless network appear more profitable.

“It is probably rational to conduct, as Verizon asks, ‘a zero-based’ review,” Goldstein said. “But then the burden of proof to add something back in should be pretty low.”

A copy of Verizon’s 300+-page redacted document can be found on the website of the Public Service Commission, filing number 66, SR. No. 13.