isen.blog

At the August 5, 2005 meeting of the FCC, following the Supreme Court's decision that cable modem connectivity is an information service, the FCC leveled (lowered) the playing field by declaring that DSL, too, is an information service. These decisions remove the common carrier obligation of the line owner to share -- non-carrier ISPs like Earthlink are left to twist slowly in the wind. The industry is, for all intents, re-verticalized.

The central idea of the Telecom Act of 1996 -- that competition would replace regulation -- is all but dead. Regulation has systematically fought competition since 1996. Regulation has won.

The last two areas of potential competition, municipal networks and multimodalism, are being reduced to struggling also-rans. (Muni networks are under attack on every front, and the Powell drive for multimodal facilities-based competition isn't getting the emphasis it deserves in the Martin FCC.)

At least FCC Commissioner Copps realized the enormity of the experiment the FCC is doing. On August 5, he wrote

I objected strenuously to [the FCC's] original reclassification of cable modem and our tentative reclassification of wireline broadband. But the Supreme Court['s Brand X decision] has fundamentally changed the legal landscape . . . The handwriting is on the wall. DSL will be reclassified . . . [T]oday . . . we take the dramatic step of reclassifying DSL in order to spur broadband deployment and to help consumers. I want us to test that proposition a year from now. If by next year consumers have more broadband options, lower prices, higher speeds and better services, maybe this proposition holds true. If our broadband take-rate reverses course and the United States begins to climb up the ladder of broadband penetration rather than falling further behind so many other nations, then we’ll have something to crow about . . . I hope next year the Commission will put its money where its mouth is and check to see if its theory yields real world results for American consumers. And if it doesn’t achieve these results, I hope we’ll admit it. I plan to keep tabs.

Certainly the FCC has the authority to revisit its decision; it is a reasonable interpretation of law. But if they do, I'll be very surprised. I'm afraid that Copps is living in a reality-based fantasy world.

Thanks to Francois Menard, writing on the Cybertelecom list, for pointing me to this.

Technorati Tags: BrandX, Broadband, Content-Conduit, F2C, FCC