yet another view on ex-Chairman Powell

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Bruce Kushnick <bruce () newnetworks com>
Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 21:32:11 -0500
To: <dave () farber net>
Subject: Re: [IP] WSJ Poll on soon to be ex-Chairman Powell

in response ---Wall Street Journal.
 
========
The Legacy of FCC Chairman Powelll --- His score -- "F" for
"Forgeddaboutit."

 
My own belief is that his administration can be summed up as "regulatory
capture" by the phone companies and total lack of any accountability. His
pro-duopoly stance, consolidation of media and broadband players, and bad
economic models have cost us more than it's paid off.
 
Granted some of these started under the Kinnard Administration, while Powell
was commissioner, not chairman. My take:
 
*   Powell helped cause and strengthen the telecom crash, and thus the US
downturn. He ignored the entire competitive enforcement issue, and did not
create an environment for these companies to work. --- About 3000 ISPs have
been put out of business, hundreds of CLECs and hundreds of billions of
investment lost. 
 
* Powell and the state regulators let the Bells off the hook for deploying
fiber-to-the-home, which was supposed to be ubiquitous in 2000. He never
investigated the subject and continued to rewrite broadband history by
ignoring the Bell's previous obligations and commitments, even though they
received over $120 billion. Had these networks been actually deployed, the
crash would have been much milder, if at all.
 
*   Powell's broadband strategy has been to give the bell companies the
exclusive use of the new networks without any caveats to making sure they
actually deploy anything.
 
*   Phone bills are still unreadable and his administration is
anti-consumer. Last we heard, the NASUCA petition to clean up questionable
charges on the phone bill has been shelved.
 
*   The FCC raised the FCC Line Charge (on all wireline bills) from $3.50 to
$6.50 with virtually no cost support, and proposed it go up again to $10, as
part of a business-cabal, the Intercarrier Compensation Forum.
 
* He allowed the phone companies to not have to compete with each other as
described by the merger conditions, and never held them accountable. SBC was
supposed to be in 30 cities by 2002 offering wireline competition... oops.
No Bell competes with another Bell in wireline services in any serious way.
 
*   He closed down the FCC audits of the Bells equipment, which found $19
billion dollars of missing equipment (and that was only 1/4 of the potential
audits to be completed) because his buddy Billy Tauzin made noise (Billy,
the Bell friendly Commerce Committee chair, nominated Powell.) Regardless of
the hype, all charges of all services used the equipment in the network as
the starting point -- including the FCC line charge.
 
* He pushed through the Bells entry into Long distance prematurely, even
though there were clear anti-competitive  practices and lots of
documentation. The Bells, through cross-subsidization, (read customer
funded)has been able to use their wireline local phone service to make them
the dominant Long distance providers.
 
* Powell's "Consumer Advisory Committee" had over 1/3 of the members as
industry lawyers, including CTIA, Verizon, NCTA, etc. --- No consumers need
apply.
 
Outcome --- The Bells, now only 4 companies (BellSouth, SBC, Verizon,
(including GTE and SNET)) and Qwest are now the largest Long Distance,
Wireless, Wireline, DSL providers... duh.... AT&T and others are pulling out
of the local phone markets because of unprofitable wholesale pricing.  ISPs
can't resell bell DSL profitably, and the DLECs have mostly been put out of
business. We talk about rewriting the Telecom Act again because this
administration already rewrote it or couldn't figure out the true intent of
the law --- lower prices and broadband through competition.
 
I give Powell an "F" --- "Forgeddaboutit."
 
Bruce Kushnick, Teletruth
 
================================
Barry wrote:
> By now, everyone knows that FCC Chair Michael Powell announced his resignation
yesterday, effective in >March of this year. In addition to reporting on the
event, the Wall Street Journal ran an online poll on the >Chairman's tenure.

> WSJ subscribers can see the results here:
> http://discussions.wsj.com/n/mb/message.asp?webtag=wsjvoices&tid=3404&vote=5&su
bmit=Vote 
<http://discussions.wsj.com/n/mb/message.asp?webtag=wsjvoices&amp;tid=3404&amp;v
ote=5&amp;submit=Vote>

> I took a quick screen shot of the poll results -- if you don't have a WSJ
subscription, you can see the results >here:
> http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2005/01/wsj_poll_gives_.html
<http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2005/01/wsj_poll_gives_.html>

> Surprisingly, the typically conservative WSJ readers overwhelmingly gave the
deregulator turned crusading >moralist an "F."  Over half gave him very poor
marks --  39% of the over 1000 voters gave the Chairman a >failing grade --twice
as many who gave him an "A" -- while 18% awarded him a "D."

> While these polls are notoriously unscientific, I was surprised to see over
half (57%) of the voting WSJ >readerswere apparently none to impressed with the
Chairman. 



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