FCC taketh, FCC must giveth back
Two stories of note from the Washington Post this morning. First, “FCC Chief’s Plan Would Ease Line-Sharing Rules“, reveals:
The nation’s big regional telephone companies would be able to provide ultra-fast Internet and video services over new fiber-optic lines without having to lease those lines to competitors, under a draft plan circulated by the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.
Sources familiar with the proposals by Michael K. Powell said that in “new-build” areas, where copper phone lines aren’t in place and where the phone companies run fiber cables directly to homes or businesses, requirements to share those lines would be eliminated. …
Powell generally agrees with many arguments for deregulation, but, sources said, his plan would phase out many of the rules over time. It would free the regional companies from sharing requirements on their current broadband service — digital subscriber lines — only as they upgrade it by pushing fiber lines closer to homes, which would improve performance.
Details were less clear on Powell’s proposals to adjust the rules governing local phone competition, which is complicated by the fact that public utility commissions play a large role in determining rules and rates in individual states.
Powell has said that wireless and voice-over-Internet technologies already provide a lot of competition, and he has questioned rules that force the regional phone companies to share their systems with competitors.
Then in “Supreme Court Sides With NextWave,” the Supreme Court ruled:
…that the government wrongly seized more than 200 lucrative wireless licenses from a bankrupt telecommunications company. …
Now NextWave can finish building a network or sell the licenses to other companies. It will free up wireless spectrum in dozens of crowded markets, including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington.
The court, on an 8-1 vote, rejected arguments that the FCC had a regulatory interest in taking licenses from a company that is reorganizing its finances.
The Hawthorne, N.Y.-based NextWave’s $4.7 billion bid for the frequencies was the highest in 1996. After taking them back, the FCC sold the licenses in 2001 to Verizon Wireless, VoiceStream Wireless and other companies at a second auction for nearly $16 billion.
Lemme see… the Supreme Court has made a string of decisions lately that seem to indicate the FCC is not entirely on the right path. It will not be soon enough that the access issues in the first article are back in the court for Supreme consideration.
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