Incoming FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler faces an “exquisite...

prepared remarks (http://bit.ly/189wY7c). “And that only works with cognitive dissonance.” Though the prospect of overhauling the Communications Act is “bleak,” the commission’s mission “must be modernized to reflect the fundamental evolution in communications that IP technology and the Internet have wrought,” lest the agency “become irrelevant,” Cicconi said. He pointed to Skype, only 10 years old, with its 500 million registered users, compared with AT&T’s 21 million. “New technologies are rapidly replacing the services provided by the ‘carriers’ the Communications Act was written to cover,” he said. “It really isn’t complicated. If the FCC doesn’t modernize its mission, the pace of technology will leave it in the dust.” Cicconi encouraged the FCC to leave competition policy “to the antitrust laws and antitrust enforcers,” as the “vague ‘public interest’ standard” is no longer sensible in today’s world. “The need to have multiple agencies charged with ‘protecting competition’ has vanished.” In “protecting” competition, the commission ends up hurting some companies while ignoring realities of the marketplace, Cicconi said, such as when the FCC denied Qwest relief from wholesale pricing obligations in Phoenix “while refusing to acknowledge that wireless substitution had any competitive impact on the market.” Instead of protecting competition, the FCC should protect consumers, he said, by continuing to focus on things such as bill shock and public safety. The commission should also continue to identify spectrum for the upcoming spectrum auction, and handle secondary market transfers quickly and efficiently, he said. Cicconi also pushed for IP transition trials that would see the elimination of some legacy rules. “We have the time to do this right, but we have to use it properly,” he said. “The agency’s very long delays in agreeing to a set of trials in only two wire centers -- out of 4,700 in our footprint alone -- has frankly been disconcerting."