The government takes an outdated approach to Internet policymaking, said...
The government takes an outdated approach to Internet policymaking, said panelists at an Information Technology & Innovation Foundation event Wednesday. Policymakers should target regulation to areas where consumers are vulnerable and there’s market failure, said Anna-Maria Kovacs, visiting senior policy…
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scholar at the Georgetown Center for Business and Policy. Regulation should focus on “targeted situations” like high-cost rural areas and low-income consumers, she said. Kovacs cited a “tremendous amount of competition at all levels of the broadband ecosystem.” Regulators are still treating the market like 1996 when the Telecom Act was passed and landline was still dominant, she said. Consumers are now “mixing and matching” platforms and technologies rather than choosing one over another, she said. For example, only 45 percent of households today have a landline connection, and many of them mostly use wireless for calls, she said. Internet policymakers should use antitrust enforcement rather than regulation, said Jonathan Sallet, an antitrust attorney at O'Melveny and Meyers. He said antitrust focuses on what’s happening today rather than what happened yesterday, and case-by-case adjudications force government to consider current facts specific to the situation. Along similar lines, all statutes and rules should be time-limited to force government to rethink them periodically, he said. “I don’t think it’s possible to develop rigid prescriptive rules.”