Obsolete Laws Hurt Everyone, Including Minorities, Telecom Executives Say
The Telecom Act needs updating because the now outdated law is hurting all stakeholders, including minorities, the top Washington executives at the two largest telcos said Wednesday. What’s worse, large portions of the 1996 law are based on language in the original 1934 Communications Act, said AT&T’s Jim Cicconi. Verizon’s Tom Tauke said if lawmakers get the policy right, it will lead to the deployment of more infrastructure and services, and “therefore more economic opportunities made available for people who want to part of the industry infrastructure,” as well as for “everybody who uses it.” They spoke at Wednesday’s Minority Media and Telecommunications Council conference.
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.
Minorities are 34 percent of the population and 40 percent of the wireless market, said AT&T Senior Executive Vice President Jim Cicconi. Seven percent more minorities use wireless as a primary means of accessing the Internet as compared to white Americans, he said. “It’s one of the reasons the minority has a real stake” in the success of efforts to build out wireless networks, he said. “They are disproportionately helping the minority population."
The Telecom Act is generally irrelevant to the world we live in today, said Tauke. “The current law is just obsolete. There’s no other way to characterize it: It’s just obsolete,” he said. “It was written prior to applications, prior to 4G, prior to 3G, prior to 2G, prior to browsing. … Everybody profits from having policies that actually are relevant to the world in which we live, and so if we can get a communications policy adopted by the Congress that is relevant to the industry and the world and the technology and the markets in which we are operating, that’s going to, I think, improve things for everyone.” Young people apply for jobs using the Internet, and businesses that don’t consider themselves part of the online world function by using the Web, Tauke said. “If we get this right, the opportunities will explode all across society and will deliver things like education and healthcare and sustainability."
The problem is not so much that parts of the 1996 Act were written before the Internet, but that many parts were “adopted wholesale from the 1934 Act,” Cicconi said. The FCC’s core regulatory structure and tools “were written in 1934 for a monopoly, voice-only copper line phone system,” he said. The impediment is “not just the law itself, but the desire of the agency to try to apply 1934-type telephone regulations to what is essentially Internet, fiber-based IP infrastructure that it was never intended to cover,” he said. Just like when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, “their only tool is telephone regulation, and the temptation is to treat the Internet like it’s one gigantic telephone,” he said.
For Verizon, supporting minority ventures makes financial sense, Tauke said. “We are focused on sending a big chunk of our investment to the minority community, because frankly, those are our customers.” Verizon wants to see that customer base prosper, and one way to do that is through investments, he said: Verizon is a member of the Billion Dollar Roundtable, which consists of 18 American companies that invest more than $1 billion per year with minority enterprises. Last year Verizon invested $3.8 billion. “This is because it’s a good thing for our business,” Tauke said. “Hopefully it’s good for society, but it’s also the right way for us to do business.” In 2011, AT&T, also a member of the roundtable, spent $12 billion on “diverse businesses” that are minority- and women-owned, Cicconi said.
The FCC is doing a good job focusing on diversity, said Ronald Johnson, a member of the agency’s Diversity Committee. “It’s clear to me that some of those ideas and suggestions for going forward” offered by commissioners earlier in the conference “emanated out of the conversation that they've had with our diversity committee,” he said. But minority business owners interested in formulating partnerships with the big telecom providers have to do so early on, he said. “If you're not there at the beginning of that process, you will probably have no one to blame but yourself, and quite frankly it will be too late for you,” he said. “If we're going to build 500,000 new cellphone towers, you want to be a major player in that build. You don’t want to join the party a year later and be hired to do the maintenance and upgrade.”