Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Mike Powell on Next Telecom Act
[a version of this appeared today on Dave Farber's IP list.]
At the Silicon Flatirons Telecom Summit last weekend,
outgoing FCC Chairman Powell elaborated on how he thinks the next telecom act should look and work.
Wireless Week said, “Powell . . . thinks the Telecom Act of 1996 is broken but to completely rewrite the law would be a mistake. Powell said a better course of action would be to write an IP statute that will take the industry forward. Powell said reopening the Telecom Act to a total rewrite could take seven or eight years and would open it up to a wide range of political influences.”
This is an oversimplification. Bob Frankston’s observations
capture the essence of what Powell said with more fidelity. Frankston wrote, “[Powell’s] point is that a simple statute presuming IP is a positive step and the only viable choice.”
I took some fairly close notes; below I try to render them into prose that captures more of Powell’s meaning.
Powell asked rhetorically, can the solution be worse than the current broken act? Answer: definitely. An act as complex as the current Telecom Act is subject to constant re-interpretation and litigation. Not only would rewriting the Act from Page One be incredibly difficult and subject to the same failings as the current Act, but in the seven or eight years it takes to write it, Wall Street will hold back on new network investment until it gets an impression of who the winners and losers will be.
So, Powell said, we should not start to rewrite the Act from
Page One. Instead, we should write a small, light IP statute, 25 pages, max. Not the 2500-page Telecom Act at all; the IP Act of 2005. Powell’s vision is that as IP networks and applications grow and older, more vertically integrated applications shrink, such an act will replace the older Telecom Acts, resulting in what he calls, “Self-executing deregulation.” He used this term at least twice; self-executing.
This idea of a small self-executing IP act is remarkably close to Rick Whitt’s proposal for new legislation, “A Horizontal Leap Forward,” which proposes that all IP apps should be regulated lightly, and that physical connectivity should be regulated differently than applications, according to the Internet’s layered model. Of course, there are many ways to regulate network connectivity; the key point is that the new Act should start where the new technology is, not attempt to recapitulate the old technology or regulatory model.
At the Silicon Flatirons Telecom Summit last weekend,
outgoing FCC Chairman Powell elaborated on how he thinks the next telecom act should look and work.
Wireless Week said, “Powell . . . thinks the Telecom Act of 1996 is broken but to completely rewrite the law would be a mistake. Powell said a better course of action would be to write an IP statute that will take the industry forward. Powell said reopening the Telecom Act to a total rewrite could take seven or eight years and would open it up to a wide range of political influences.”
This is an oversimplification. Bob Frankston’s observations
capture the essence of what Powell said with more fidelity. Frankston wrote, “[Powell’s] point is that a simple statute presuming IP is a positive step and the only viable choice.”
I took some fairly close notes; below I try to render them into prose that captures more of Powell’s meaning.
Powell asked rhetorically, can the solution be worse than the current broken act? Answer: definitely. An act as complex as the current Telecom Act is subject to constant re-interpretation and litigation. Not only would rewriting the Act from Page One be incredibly difficult and subject to the same failings as the current Act, but in the seven or eight years it takes to write it, Wall Street will hold back on new network investment until it gets an impression of who the winners and losers will be.
So, Powell said, we should not start to rewrite the Act from
Page One. Instead, we should write a small, light IP statute, 25 pages, max. Not the 2500-page Telecom Act at all; the IP Act of 2005. Powell’s vision is that as IP networks and applications grow and older, more vertically integrated applications shrink, such an act will replace the older Telecom Acts, resulting in what he calls, “Self-executing deregulation.” He used this term at least twice; self-executing.
This idea of a small self-executing IP act is remarkably close to Rick Whitt’s proposal for new legislation, “A Horizontal Leap Forward,” which proposes that all IP apps should be regulated lightly, and that physical connectivity should be regulated differently than applications, according to the Internet’s layered model. Of course, there are many ways to regulate network connectivity; the key point is that the new Act should start where the new technology is, not attempt to recapitulate the old technology or regulatory model.
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