SANTA CLARA, Calif.—Wireless Carterfone supporters tried to tu...

University conference commemorating the 40th anniversary of the FCC Carterfone order breaking the wireline phone system’s control over attachments. A long line of Supreme Court cases starting with Red Lion empowers the commission to protect a “robust marketplace of ideas” by promoting diversity that the FCC should extend to telecom from TV and radio through wireless Carterfone, said Media Access Project President Andrew Schwartzman. Carrier practices such as restricting file sizes and directing subscribers to partner search engines act as limits on expression, Schwartzman said. Verizon Wireless has raised the First Amendment on the other side of the question, contending that imposing rules would restrict the diversity that the market offers. Schwartzman raised “an important issue,” said Nicolas Johnson of the University of Iowa’s law school, who as an FCC commissioner wrote the majority opinion in Carterfone. Contending that competitiveness of the cellular market makes it completely inappropriate to extend Carterfone from its Bell monopoly context were George Ford, the Phoenix Center’s chief economist, and James Speta of Northwestern University’s law school. Carterfone doesn’t apply outside the world of monopoly, strong regulation and guaranteed returns from which it emerged, Speta said. Rules on devices are beside the point in a world where consumers have a wide choice of cellphones and operators have controlled Skype and P2P in their networks, not through leverage over hardware, Ford said. “It’s not just the equipment,” he said. “It’s the terms of the agreement we have to use it.” And it’s Apple that dictated to carriers what the iPhone 3G would be, Speta said.