Disclosure of Confidential Data

Party's Position

Pursuant to an agreement between NeuStar and the State of California (Utilization Agreement) NeuStar collects and analyzes carrier utilization information and reports the results to the Commission. The Utilization Agreement prohibits NeuStar personnel from disclosing the confidential utilization information to any third party, including other NeuStar personnel outside of those working on data collection pursuant the Utilization Agreement, without the permission of the Commission. Accordingly, NeuStar requests that the Commission modify the decision to authorize NeuStar to disclose the confidential carrier utilization information only to NeuStar PA personnel that require the information to carry out the directives of the D.00-07-022. This modification is requested in order to ensure that the pro-rated carrier billing adjustments can be made by the PA personnel based on number utilization data as prescribed by D.00-07-052.

Discussion

The modification in D.00-07-052 sought by NeuStar is premised on the PA's need to access each carrier's number utilization data in order to make the pro rata calculations of billings to individual carriers based upon numbers assigned to customers. Since the carrier-specific number utilization data is confidential, a separate Commission order would be needed to provide the PA with access to such data.

Instead of ordering release of confidential data as proposed by NeuStar, however, we conclude that a preferable solution is to modify the numerical formula for the pro rata calculation to avoid the need for confidential data. We conclude that a reasonable and competitively neutral allocation of number pooling costs can be accomplished by basing the pro ration on total blocks of numbers held by each carrier. By charging for number pooling costs in direct proportion to the share of number blocks that carriers hold, no carrier will be placed at a competitive disadvantage by bearing a disproportionate share of pooling costs.

Pro ration of billing based on total thousand blocks held by carriers (rather than numbers actually utilized by customers) will avoid the need to divulge confidential carrier-specific utilization data. Unlike actual quantities of numbers utilized, the total of number blocks assigned to each carrier is not confidential, but is publicly available information. Thus, NeuStar can determine each carrier's NXX holdings, and determine each carrier's pro rata share of pooling costs without access to confidential carrier-specific data.

In order to enable the PA to access the data needed to periodically update carrier billing pro rations for shared pooling costs, therefore, we shall modify D.00-07-052 as follows. We shall require that total thousand-number blocks held by each carrier (rather than numbers utilized by customers) be used to make the billing pro rations. Thus, each carrier's allocation of total shared costs shall be pro rated based upon the number of thousand blocks it holds in the NPA as a percentage of the total thousand-number blocks held by all carriers in the NPA where the pool is being conducted. In the case of those carriers that are not participants in the number pool, their allocation of shared pooling costs shall be based on the total number of NXX codes they hold in the NPA (each NXX counting as ten thousand-number blocks). For those carriers that are participants in the number pool, their total number blocks used in the calculation shall be the total number of NXX codes in their inventory, plus any thousand blocks they have drawn from the pool, less any thousand blocks they have donated to the pool. With these modifications, it is not necessary for the PA to access any confidential number utilization data.

In order to provide a reasonably up-to-date pro ration of billing costs, we also shall require the PA to update the carrier-specific number block data at regular specified intervals. We did not previously address the issue of updating in the D.00-07-052. We conclude, however, that annual updating of the number block data is reasonable, and shall direct that this requirement take effect one year after the initial reporting date for data used to make the pro ration as ordered in D.00-07-022.