Congress Should Abandon Plans to Rewrite Telecom Act, Copps Says
Former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said Congress should abandon any notion of passing a revised Telecom Act. Copps, now an adviser to Common Cause, said on a Thursday panel at a Multicultural, Media, Telecom and Internet Council's (MMTC) broadband symposium, the real need is for the FCC to enforce the rules already on the books rather than approve new rules.
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“If I thought we could get a good bill out of this process, I’d be more enthused about it,” Copps said. “We won’t and that’s why I’m not.” The major problems with the 1996 act, the most recent update, have nothing to do with the act itself, he said: The problem is “the FCC did a lousy job of enforcing it," especially the most of the competitive parts.
The FCC “responded too quickly to the requests of big business and the big telecom companies and in the process ignored the public interest,” Copps said. “The act never had a chance.” Copps is a Democrat, and the House and Senate are under Republican control. Copps also said the world needs to start looking at broadband access as a civil right. “You cannot be a productive citizen” in the U.S. in 2015 without “high-speed fiber broadband and an open Internet,” he said.
Former Commissioner Robert McDowell, now at Wiley Rein, said he's more optimistic than Copps about the prospects for legislation. McDowell, a Republican, noted that the ’96 act was passed by a Republican Congress and signed by a Democratic president, Bill Clinton. One big focus should be the future of federal spectrum, he said, saying 80 percent of the best spectrum is still in government hands: “I don’t think they need all of it.” Promises of a few hundred megahertz of spectrum for auction and more spectrum for unlicensed use might be enough to “start to bring people to the table” for a Telecom Act update, he said.
Rick Boucher, former Democratic chairman of the House Communications Subcommittee, said times have changed markedly since the 1996 act was approved, agreeing it's time for an update. The ’96 act “didn’t venture very much beyond plain old phone service,” he said. “It was a 20th century act that was primarily about a 19th century technology.” The act also wasn’t “forward looking” and “was stuck in its time,” Boucher said. It mentions the Internet only once, in a section that was later declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, he said, and it doesn’t address wireless.
The 1996 act was a good legislative effort but it's antiquated, said former FCC Chairman Richard Wiley, managing partner at Wiley Rein. Wiley called for the elimination for the “age-old dichotomy” between interstate and intrastate rules in the ’96 act. The difference “doesn’t make any sense in a digital IP world,” he said.
Wiley, a Republican, also urged process reform. “The pace of technology makes it very hard for regulators and legislators to keep up,” he said. “If we have a light touch approach to regulation, it will make it a lot easier for them.” Legislation also should focus on public safety and consumer protections and would provide the opportunity to eliminate the “silos” in the current law, he said. “It makes no sense to regulate functionally, digitally equivalent services in a different way depending on who provides them.” Regulatory decision-making also has to get faster, he said: In a digital world, companies can't wait three to five years for the FCC to make a decision.
MMTC was formerly known as the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council.