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IP: FCC Prepares For Broadband
From: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2000 16:07:48 -0500
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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