The Senate Commerce Committee held its third hearing today on telecom reform legislation, specifically its revamped telecom reform bill, S. 2686, the Communications, Consumer’s Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006.
It was a lengthy affair, consisting of two panels and fourteen witnesses. It was noteworthy because Ben Scott, Free Press policy director, got a lot of airtime and a lot of softball questions, which strikes me as unusual for a public interest group witness. (See Ben’s testimony here.)
In any event, the statements and testimony were predictable all the way around, except one interesting debate point cropped up over and over again: whether the Internet has ever been regulated. For most of us the answer is no — the Internet is the one pure, unregulated medium we have.
However, Scott, along with other witnesses, said that the FCC used to regulate DSL as a telecommunications service, but no longer does. Therefore, Internet service was regulated but no longer is. “There has always been regulation of the Internet. There’s title II that has always been a part of the Internet,” Scott said.
NCTA CEO Kyle McSlarrow took on that claim and said that while telco-delivered Internet services were subject to common carrier regulations, cable modem services have always been free of regulatory requirements. “There is an issue as to whether the Bells..were regulated, that is true,” he said. But, “cable has never been regulated. We have always operated in an unregulated environment.”
Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-AK) got a little testy with the idea of regulating the Internet and imposing Title II (common carrier-type) regulations on broadband providers. “We’re not going to do that,” the powerful Senator said in an emphatic way, referring to the prospect of anything that smacks of common carrier regulation applying to Internet service providers.
“We have a watchdog in the FCC and they’re told annually to report to us,” Stevens said in reference to the revised bill’s requirement that the FCC monitor and report annually on net neutrality matters. “If they see something that is a problem with net neutrality they can immediately report to us.”
Cynthia Brumfield at 1:58 PM|Comments(1)
Huh. So IF we have a problem with the telecoms we REPORT IT TO THE FCC. Oh joy. Talk about feeling like a character in a Kafka novel . . .
I think someone needs to sit this Senate Committee down and MAKE them use the FCC website. That just might make them rethink this issue . . .
Posted by: bj at June 13, 2006 8:40 PM
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