IP: FCC Prepares For Broadband

[Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>]

>X-Mailer: Novell GroupWise 5.5.3
>Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2000 15:57:48 -0500
>From: "Gerald Ballman" <ballman@gwmail.usna.edu>
>
>
>
>                     FCC prepares for broadband era
>
>                       By Patrick Mannion
>
>
>                       MANHASSET, N.Y. ¯ The Federal Communications
>                       Commission (FCC) needs to go back to school to
>                       prepare itself for the transition to digital broadband
>                       technology, its commissioner believes.
>
>                       In his keynote speech to a telecommunications
>                       conference sponsored by The Progress and
>                       Freedom Foundation earlier this month in
>                       Washington, Michael Powell, one of five FCC
>                       commissioners, cited the agency's renewed
>                       determination to address regulatory sluggishness,
>                       promote technological innovation and market
>                       competition and remain steadfastly independent in
>                       its judgments. In addition, Powell acknowledged
>                       that the FCC should educate itself more thoroughly
>                       on innovation theory and economic incentives to
>                       better arm itself for what he termed "The Great
>                       Digital Broadband Migration."
>
>                       "Our greatest challenges today at the FCC are 
> definitional," Powell
>                       said. "With increasingly converged services it is 
> difficult to trationally
>                       label and thus assign regulatory treatment to an 
> innovative provider,
>                       product or service."
>
>                       One "clear example" of the need to rethink 
> categories, he said, "is the
>                       continuing uncertainty over how to treat the 
> multitude of services
>                       that can be bundled over high-speed cable plant."
>
>                  Just beginning
>
>                       Equating the move now under way toward converged 
> broadband
>                       networks with the mass human migrations of old, 
> Powell painted a
>                       picture of a technological revolution that is only 
> yet beginning.
>
>                       "FCC and communication policy 'reform' is not the 
> question," said
>                       Powell, referring to the Telecommunications Act of 
> 1996, which aimed
>                       to open up the comms market to livelier 
> competition. "Instead, the
>                       real questions are revealed by opening our eyes to 
> the great exodus
>                       from legacy business models, legacy technical 
> infrastructures and
>                       legacy regulations."
>
>                       According to Powell, the meeting of communications 
> and processing
>                       technologies was the seminal event that led to the 
> current
>                       exponential growth in telecommunications, with its 
> potential to
>                       revolutionize the economic and regulatory 
> structures of the United
>                       States.
>
>                       Powell paid homage to the groundbreaking nature of 
> the 1996
>                       legislation, the purpose of which was to move from a
>                       regulated-monopoly model of telecommunications to a 
> deregulated,
>                       competitive-markets model. The act's preamble 
> declares that its
>                       purpose is to "promote competition and reduce 
> regulation in order to
>                       secure lower prices and higher-quality services for 
> American
>                       telecommunications consumers."
>
>                       "The 1996 act is best understood as an important 
> change in legal and
>                       economic thinking that helped ignite what I call 
> the Broadband Digital
>                       Migration," said Powell.
>
>                       'Faith in competition'
>
>                       "For nearly a century, we regulated the 
> telecommunications industry
>                       on the assumption that phone service was a natural 
> monopoly and
>                       that the public was best served by a single 
> regulated carrier," he said.
>                       This strategy promoted the objective of a 
> universal, seamless,
>                       low-cost network, but gradually that model began to 
> erode as new
>                       technologies arose. "The 1996 act was a seminal and 
> resounding
>                       declaration of faith in competition," Powell said.
>
>                       Unfortunately, while parts of the statute recognize 
> growing
>                       technological convergence, "they offer only modest 
> guidance for
>                       regulation in the converged digital era," Powell 
> went on. He pointed to
>                       a lack of a fundamental understanding of the degree 
> to which
>                       technological change is revolutionizing 
> communications markets and
>                       policy, and the still-balkanized regulatory 
> treatment of different
>                       technologies and industries, as things the FCC must 
> work on.
>
>                       Faster response
>
>                       The goal, he said, is to come up with an agenda 
> that reflects the new
>                       realities the Broadband Digital Migration is 
> ushering in. The FCC will
>                       focus on innovative incentives and more-open 
> competition, Powell
>                       promised, along with further regulatory, economic 
> and technological
>                       self-education. Making more-independent judgments 
> to fend off
>                       demands by personal-interest groups, and 
> instituting a faster
>                       regulatory response to meet the evolving market's 
> needs, are "just a
>                       few starting points" for the agency, Powell said.
>
>                       The Progress and Freedom Foundation was founded in 
> 1993 to study
>                       the digital revolution and its implications for 
> public policy. The
>                       foundation believes that the digital revolution 
> portends fundamental
>                       cultural, economic, political and social changes 
> that can usher in a
>                       new era of human progress.



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