POWELL STRESSES NEED FOR TOTAL TELECOM ACT OVERHAUL
RALEIGH, N.C. -- Frustrated by unfavorable court rulings, FCC Chmn. Powell renewed his call for a complete rewrite of the 1996 Telecom Act, in a talk with N.C. business leaders here Fri. The 2nd day of a technology tour of Wilmington and Raleigh, Powell said the Telecom Act, while “wonderful as a paradigm shift,” is now “stuck in infinite churn as a legal document.” He noted that 8 years after the passage of the act, designed principally to spur local phone competition, the FCC still doesn’t have “validated rules” for making that happen. Powell’s comments came 3 days after the U.S. Appeals Court, D.C., threw out most of the Commission’s Triennial Review Order, including its controversial decision to delegate UNE review rulings to state commissions (CD March 3 p1).
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
“We are wasting resources, time and energy on yesterday’s solutions to yesterday’s problems,” Powell said in response to questions from the N.C. Citizens for Business & Industry luncheon crowd. “The 1996 Act is walking dead.” Calling the statute already cracked, he warned that it will “implode on its own” unless “thoughtful policy-makers” put “the dynamite in the right places” and blow it up in a more controlled fashion.
Powell said a new Telecom Act “has to be simpler, dramatically shorter and standards-based rather than technology-based.” He said a new statute, unlike the current, 750,000-word law, shouldn’t try to provide answers to every possible problem. “It’s the difference between a living Constitution and a literal one,” he said. “We can’t keep regulating based on service-based definitions.” Talking to reporters later, Powell said he didn’t think a wholesale rewrite of the Telecom Act was imminent. But, he said, though a new law may not pass in the next year or 2, “it’s time to start actively talking about it… We need a sounder vision.”
Asked about indecent programming on TV and radio, Powell promised his audience “the FCC is going to be tough where it can.” He also vowed the Commission would act “swiftly” to punish blatant offenders, such as those involved in the Super Bowl half-time incident. Powell stressed again that the agency had been steadily upgrading the enforcement of its indecency rules and the size of its fines and, with Congress’s help, would continue. “I'm proud of our leadership role,” he said.
Powell warned, though, that the federal govt. can and should do only so much to police TV and radio programming. “We've got to be careful about how far we invite King George to filter content for 300 million Americans with diverse viewpoints,” he said. “I worry more about King George than I ever did about ‘Citizen Kane.'”
The FCC chmn. urged parents to play a much more active role in monitoring their children’s media use and teaching them “media literacy.” Citing the example of his 15-year-old son, a big DVD and Xbox fan, Powell said he focused on helping his son “build filters” to sort trash from quality and right from wrong. “I don’t know how to stop him from having access,” he said. “As advanced technology continues a march that no one can stop, we're going to be saturated in electronic access to the world.”
Questioned about universal broadband deployment, Powell said he’s “more enthusiastic about the potential for rural America” to receive advanced communications than ever. Thanks to the competitive pressures of several technologies in broadband -- cable, telephone, satellite, power lines and wireless -- he said there could someday be 6 different paths into American homes. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all problem,” he said. On his way to see a broadband over powerline demonstration by Progress Energy, a local utility, Powell expressed particular excitement about the broadband potential of electric wires.