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'Beware Rule of the lawyers' Hundt calls for a packet-switched global Internet By Ron Wilson, EE Times Palo Alto, Calif. -- Warning that the Internet is not spreading fast enough into outlying geographic areas or less-accessible demographic groups, Reed Hundt, the outgoing chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, called last week for a new global packet-switched medium for the Internet, and for legislation to protect the network from the political power of entrenched competitors. "We need a packet-switched global network to replace the circuit-switched Net," Hundt said in his keynote address at the Hot Chips Symposium last week. "We can make the libraries of the world available at the touch of a key to kids in their classrooms. That alone would do more to advance educational equality than anything since the work of Horace Mann. And such a network would single-handedly change the mass-market, least-common-denominator model of the media." But serious obstacles stand in the way of the new Internet, Hundt said. "First, the economics of the Internet are wacky," he said. "We have a hybrid of regulated telephone monopolies and not-for-profit academic institutions where we need to have a competitive market. This hybrid gives us part useful chaos, and part pure obstacle." Hundt also cited bottlenecks to competition that could block the deployment of new services. "There need to be rules to ensure that a competitor can lease the telcos' local loops for any purpose; to ensure that a competitor can connect to or route around the telcos' switches; to preempt state-regulated monopoly over T1 lines; and to ensure competitors' access to the inside and outside wiring serving homes and businesses. It cannot be that new competitors have to sign new leases with apartment owners, or to wait until a building is replaced before gaining access to it." Such rules must be protected from what Hundt called "the rule of lawyers." The implementation of the Telecommunications Act of 1996--"basically a right law," Hundt said--has become "a nightmare of litigation and distortion," he said. Hundt said telephone companies had adopted the tactic of blocking implementation of the bill by filing a huge number of suits at the state level. "GTE alone has filed suit in more than 30 district courts in 20 states, just arguing over how they should be allowed to charge their competitors," he said. "When the states-rights agenda is used to limit the power of the federal government, I can have some sympathy. But when it is used basically to prolong a monopoly, something has gone wrong." Another threat to the creation of the packet network is the tangle of problems concerning newly available wireless spectrum, Hundt said. "The airwaves are an enormous opportunity for bandwidth expansion," he said. "We have tried to get that spectrum all on the market, and to create no rules about how it should be used." But Hundt said that communications interests have fought in the Congress to prevent spectrum auctions, and to impose rules that would prevent, for example, digital-TV broadcasters from using part of digital-TV bandwidth for data services. Finally, Hundt warned of an enormous lobbying reaction that will occur as the Internet begins to emerge as a formidable competitor to the established switched-network providers. "The Internet service providers today are like the buccaneers who served Queen Elizabeth," Hundt said. "They raid the Spanish fleet here and there, but the $200 billion telephone industry doesn't mind giving up a few billion to them. As the threat grows, though, the telcos will mount an army of lobbyists, and they will come down on Washington like the Spanish Armada sailing against England." Hundt proposed new legislation in response to these threats. "I'd like to see a new, simple law that will do five things," he said. "First, it would state that the First Amendment clearly protects Internet content. Second, it would give the FCC clear power to order states not to regulate packet services. Third, it would keep data networks free from either paying into or drawing from subsidy pools. Fourth, it would give the FCC clear authority to impose on the states policies that open bottlenecks to competition. And fifth, it would establish a single court of appeals nationally in which these issues can be argued. We need to set the regulations and get on with it."
(Next article.) (c) 1997 CMP Media, Inc [This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]
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