FCC Needs to Move Away from Regulatory ‘Old-Think,’ AT&T’s Quinn Says
Completing the IP transition and adjusting the regulatory regime to take that change into account is one of the key challenges that will face the FCC in 2013, said AT&T Senior Vice President Bob Quinn and other industry officials Thursday at a symposium sponsored by the Phoenix Center.
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.
"I think all of the things that are left are really hard,” Quinn said. “If you want to move to a broadband plan you have to allow the carriers to retire the older technology. You can’t require companies to continue to provide legacy technologies as well as IP technologies. … I think the reality of the Universal Service [reform] order was there’s not enough money to pay for universal broadband everywhere, so we've got to maximize the amount of private investment.”
Historically, the FCC regulated the service offered by carriers and the infrastructure as essentially the same thing, Quinn said. “I think the hard thing for regulators to get their arms around is that in a world where we move to IP we really separate the service from the infrastructure, really for the first time, and you no longer have to have the infrastructure … to offer voice services or video services or anything at all.” AT&T formally proposed in November that the FCC start a proceeding on the transition from TDM to IP networks (CD Nov 8 p11).
"The FCC is going to have to be flexible,” said CTIA Vice President Chris Guttman-McCabe. “They're going to have to take a really hard look at how much every issue that they could touch could be impacted or will be impacted by this transition.”
Speakers agreed the FCC’s recent text-to-911 order illustrates the problems that will have to be confronted by the commission (CD Nov 29 p1). The FCC imposed a requirement that carriers send bounce-back messages to subscribers saying they need to call 911 instead, but did not initially impose the same requirement on text platforms offered by over-the-top carriers. “Our argument was ‘do you realize the confusion that you create once you launch this,'” Guttman-McCabe said. “You can see this type of issue arising with a multitude of proceedings at the commission.”
"I lived that text-to-911 order and where it started was just a horrible place,” Quinn said. “It was just old-think. It was ‘Now we're going to attach this to the infrastructure guys.'” The FCC needs to ask “what are the characteristics of this service that we need to decide to regulate … for public safety purposes,” he said. “We never had that discussion at the commission. The commission … they were approaching it from a perspective of we've got authority over the infrastructure guys, so we're going to regulate the infrastructure guys. That has to change."
The FCC needs to impose a hard date for the IP transition, said Blair Levin, who managed the FCC’s National Broadband Plan and is a former FCC chief of staff. “The government owes it to industry to say there is a time at which we will stop making you invest in obsolete networks,” Levin said. “We are not making capital allocation decisions for you. That to me is the only thing I would be perfectly firm on.”
Levin said pending changes at the FCC are a complicating factor as the commission takes on big issues like the IP transition. Levin acknowledged he has “no earthly idea” when Chairman Julius Genachowski will leave the commission, but “history suggests” that will happen by the end of the year. “Since history suggests that and since everyone at the FCC is aware of that history, their minds, shall we say, are slightly different,” he said. “They are not focused in the same way that they would be if they thought the current chair was going to be there for two or three years. That’s a transition on top of the transition that will inevitably slow the IP transition."
Quinn said some competitive carriers have gone on the record complaining that the AT&T petition was irrelevant since the IP transition already is a key question in 38 open dockets at the commission. “In response to the National Broadband Plan team’s report saying we should do this comprehensively, the FCC went out and raised these issues in 38 different unrelated proceedings,” he said. “That’s the problem.” Given the time it takes the FCC to issue orders, “I would think that 38 different orders out of the commission in really tough dockets, to resolve all of these issues, would take about 15 years,” Quinn said.