Phones are wireless, consumers are cutting back, and copper is expensive: all are reasons why the big phone companies want permission from the FCC to walk away from old-fashioned landline networks and to keep moving toward an internet-based future. The FCC tentatively agrees, and voted 3-2 today to take another baby step in the process that will end up making the nation’s century-old copper landline network obsolete.

Formally, the FCC adopted a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) that sets down the broad strokes of the commission’s requirements for the next steps in what’s known as the IP transition (where voice service moves from copper wires to internet protocol). The key areas the FCC’s proposal addresses are:

• Protecting consumers’ ability to call 911 from their home phones in a power outage
• Requiring transparency to consumers about the transition to new tech
• Making sure new tech actually works before old tech is allowed to be discontinued
• Preserving competition among services that use and rely on copper networks when those networks are shut down

The commission also clarified that carriers will need to seek approval to discontinue “legacy” service based on “the practical impact of its actions,” rather than based on existing regulatory fine print. The declaratory ruling “ensures that there will be a public process to evaluate a proposed discontinuance,” or, in English, guarantees that companies like Verizon and AT&T can’t just disappear landline phone service overnight all at once because they said so.

The specifics of the proposed rule put forward today address several areas of consumer concern. Verizon in particular has been accused in the past of permitting their copper-wire networks to degrade in order to push consumers into adopting VoIP services whether they want to or not.

The FCC and consumer advocates have also voiced concern about the ability to contact emergency services in a power outage. Copper-wire landline phones still work in most outages, but internet-based phones need to rely on a backup battery with a much shorter lifespan.

Today’s vote was the latest step in a long process that the FCC has been moving through for some time. In January of this year, the commission approve limited regional tests replacing old-fashioned landlines with new tech to see how they went. That process is still underway.

The NPRM adopted today doesn’t change anything yet. First, like every FCC rulemaking, it has a pleading and public comment period to go through. Then the commission gets to work crafting and voting on a final version of the rule.

Commissioner Ajit Pai, one of the two dissenting votes against the NPRM, said that “The commission has no business micromanaging each change a carrier makes to its network,” and argued that concerns about consumer harm are a “Chicken Little” baseless, unproven claim that the sky is falling.

However, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler disagreed, pointing to Verizon’s response to rebuilding — or rather, not rebuilding — damaged service in New York in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

“This is not a hypothetical issue,” said Wheeler. He added, “Technology transitions will be speeded up by technology neutral rules that promote, preserve and protect … the set of values that consumers have rightly come to expect from their networks.”

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