IP Democracy: BellSouth Supports Complete Dereg in Telecom Act Rewrite

BellSouth is going for broke in its approach to the pending rewrite of the 1996 Telecom Act. The major telco ballyhooed at a National Press Club lunch today a working paper by two esteemed university professors which concludes that complete and total deregulation of the phone business is the best policy to pursue in a legislative overhaul.

In their paper “Can We Avoid Repeating the Mistakes of the Past in Telecommunications Regulatory Reform?,” Charles Fine of MIT and John de Figueiredo of Princeton looked at a series of industries that had either been partially or totally deregulated and concluded that partial deregulation is ultimately too little and too late against the backdrop of changing market conditions.

Fine and de Figueiredo say there is an object lesson to be learned for telecommunications.

We believe these case studies, in railroads, natural gas, banking, airlines, and wireless telephony, can be helpful in shaping the understanding of the regulatory issues to be addressed in the telecommunications industry today. The principal shocks to hit telecom in the past decade have been technological and have converged upon each other: the emergence of the Internet and the rise of ubiquitous wireless communications networks for mobile telephony and data exchanges. These new technology platforms have triggered the development of both a completely new communications infrastructure that enable competitive alternatives to traditional voice and data telephone services. Each of these technologies has enabled new entrants to compete with traditional telephone companies whose primary business had been to offer voice and data services over networks built with copper wire. Increasingly, copper, fiber, and wireless networks compete with each other and are substitutes for each other, with copper networks being subject to the most stringent regulatory constraints.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on May 24, 2005 4:05 PM to IP Democracy