Telecom Rewrite Could Be ‘Incredible Legacy’ for Obama, Verizon Lobbyist Says

"By the time we're sitting here next year, the House could be done, could have already voted on this legislation or could be voting on it in September,” said Verizon Senior Vice President-Government Relations Peter Davidson at the TPI event, video of which the organization posted online. “If that timetable holds true, the administration is going to come forward -- and I'm optimistic anyway, it’s the last two years of the president’s term -- will work with Congress to try to get something that’s a signable package. … This would be an incredible legacy for the president to sign something like this.” The Obama administration will “come forward early on and start engaging in the process, and I think the Senate would be not too far behind the House as well,” predicted Davidson, a former Republican Hill staffer.

House Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., and Communications Subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., have not said when they hope to complete drafting their Communications Act update. They issued four white papers seeking comment this year and say they plan to tackle legislation next year.

"Is it real this time? Yes, I absolutely think it is,” said Rick Boucher, co-chair of the Internet Innovation Alliance, which includes AT&T. A former Democratic chairman of the House Communications Subcommittee, he’s a partner at Sidley Austin. “I can understand the healthy dose of skepticism that anyone applies today to a conversation about any major legislative effort moving through the Congress,” said Boucher. “We are affected by gridlock. That said, where bipartisan consensus is possible, change can occur.” He called the House Republican timeline “generally realistic,” but said it may face a delay of a couple years due to gridlock. “This is a very thoughtful approach, much more farsighted than what we did in ‘96,” Boucher added. “I give these two Republicans real credit,” he said of Upton and Walden.

"I wouldn’t say it’s a unified voice calling for reform but it’s a lot of voices calling for different types of reform, and that’s exactly the situation where under our constitutional system that Congress has to look at those big policy questions,” Davidson said. “This is something for Congress to tackle.” The situation has evolved considerably from the era of the 1996 act, he said, noting, “I'm not sure it’s accurate to say that all telecom companies are in favor of big reform right now” and are questioning the very definition of what marks a telecom company these days. He pointed to “a lot of desire and a lot of recognition of the need to do something in many different sectors,” mentioning issues of video, privacy, cybersecurity and Internet governance, and “a real need to look at this and modernize the structures. But I don’t believe there’s alignment within any of the industries per se the way there was in ‘96,” Davidson said. “There was a big group that had very unified objectives on both sides."

High-Level Principles?

"Can we get to a state where Congress is able to have the restraint to do high-level principles and you have some level of confidence that the institutions can implement them?” asked Philip Weiser, executive director of Silicon Flatirons and dean of the University of Colorado Law School. “That’s going to ask a lot of Congress. Congress hasn’t always necessarily been in that mood.” But lawmakers have done so in the past and could again now, Weiser said, urging legislation emanating from a high level of principles. One challenge for Congress “will be to legislate at a high enough level” but if lawmakers get too down in the weeds, “it’s probably better we don’t have the act at all,” he remarked.

One issue that’s “far too explosive” is net neutrality, Boucher warned, with Republicans and Democrats far apart. He framed it as an “outlier” issue in a telecom space that’s largely bipartisan otherwise. “I would say if network neutrality finds its way into the heart of the telecom reform, it’s not going to happen,” Boucher said. Davidson suggested Congress could “deal with the net neutrality issue” by addressing it at the level of high principles, as Weiser recommended, “at a level that’s not getting into the muck of where we are on [Communications Act Section] 706 versus Title II and kind of in the weeds there.” One mistake in the 1996 act involved mandating access to incumbent networks with wholesale pricing, Boucher said: “Mandated access at regulated wholesale prices is probably not the best way.” He praised Google Fiber’s method of going to municipalities to request incentives, and other incentive-based models.

"We don’t have a political process that’s oriented toward fixing problems,” said Roger Noll, co-director of Stanford University’s Program on Regulatory Policy, casting doubt on any effort to overhaul the Telecom Act. “I'm not saying it’s impossible, I'm just saying it’s extremely unlikely.” He pointed to the fragmented political climate in which legislation is “largely a symbolic gesture” intended to signal to constituents. Noll also is affiliated with the American Antitrust Institute.

"The need to modernize based on an Internet culture instead of the culture of the 1934 act or the 1996 act is ultimately what’s going to bring these disparate entities together to push for reform,” Davidson argued. “There’s kind of a growing realization that all these new technologies, these products and services that are coming online and are part of the Internet ecosystem, are looking at the prospects of being regulated under Title II and realizing that before they invest their money in building out those kind of structures, some kind of certainty on the regulatory front would be a good thing.” (jhendel@warren-news.com)