IP Democracy: NCTA Head: Time to Overhaul the FCC

(Washington, DC) It’s no secret that there is little love lost between the FCC under current Chairman Kevin Martin and the cable industry. Therefore it’s not surprising that the head of the industry’s main trade association, NCTA CEO Kyle McSlarrow, made a call today at a Media Institute luncheon for an overhaul of communications regulation that downgrades the role of the FCC from regulatory to oversight agency.

Using as his template PFF’s Digital Age Communications Act project, McSlarrow said the FCC should assume a role

more like that of the Federal Trade Commission. The FCC would have authority to intervene in the marketplace only if it determines that marketplace competition would not adequately protect consumers against unfair methods of competition or unfair and deceptive practices. There would be a presumption against regulation, and in fact all FCC regulations would sunset in five years.

Although McSlarrow generally argued for sweeping away “much of the accumulated regulatory baggage that burdens the communications industries,” he made clear that this widespread deregulatory approach doesn’t apply to the public switched telephone networks, cable’s biggest competitors. In particular, McSlarrow stressed the need to maintain interconnection regulations that apply to the big (and little) incumbent phone carriers because they are “special.”

And, of course, there is something especially unique about the public switched telephone network, a network built with a government grant of monopoly to the original AT&T and funded through rate of return regulation. There simply is nothing like it in the rest of America’s communications universe. No matter how many facilities-based providers of voice service use fiber, the Internet, coax, or copper, every one of them will need to be able to exchange traffic with the public switched network for the foreseeable future.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on May 15, 2007 3:28 PM to IP Democracy