Tuesday’s “Internet Transformation Panel,” hosted by the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s...

(http://xrl.us/bnuwe2). At the event, speakers endorsed FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai’s push for the creation of an Internet Protocol transition task force to speed the industry’s transition to all-IP networks (CD Oct 17 p3). The Broadband Coalition, which represents competitive carriers, said the panel wasn’t about the Internet at all, but was actually “a front for phony phone company arguments designed to eliminate the competitive policies that govern such basic obligations as connecting networks to one another so everyone can talk.” It doesn’t matter whether packets are traveling over copper or fiber, or using TDM or IP technology; “it’s all the same to the 1996 Act and to the wires,” the coalition said, arguing the FCC needs to “continue enforcing technology-neutral policies governing last mile connectivity and interconnection.” Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood said Pai’s comments “repeat a common theme” pushed by AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, which “distorts reality and ignores the plight of consumers in America’s uncompetitive broadband market.” The principles undergirding common carriage are “not outdated,” are “incredibly important,” and are “directly responsible for producing the Internet revolution,” Wood said. “We need regulators to understand that new technology is not a magical solution to the natural monopoly problems inherent in communications networks. The transition to new transmission technologies didn’t alter the fundamental reality that the wires and channels carrying our communications are sold in a near-monopoly environment."