WASHINGTON-If a proposal to convert the Federal Communications Commission into a regulator focused on competition like the Federal Trade Commission is accepted, the new FCC should make more entrenched players prove they are not being anti-competitive rather than make the start-ups prove they are, said Jonathan Askin, general counsel of pulver.com, a consultancy for Voice over Internet Protocol technology.
“I would flip the burden of proof,” said Askin.
The Progress & Freedom Foundation Friday released a report and model legislative language to model the FCC after the FTC. At a PFF-sponsored forum Tuesday, various industry and academic leaders, regulators and lawmakers responded to the report.
“I understand the preference for adjudication rather than regulation but I am not sure I would drink that Kool-Aid all the way, but getting rid of the mesh of regulations is a good idea,” said Thomas Sugrue, former chief of the FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau and now vice president of government affairs at T-Mobile USA Inc.
While the telecom industry is becoming competitive, some aspects still make a separate regulator necessary, according to PFF.
“If you have a sector-specific regulator, they are going to focus on that sector. If that sector doesn’t need to be regulated, they will find a way to regulate it or else they would be out of a job,” countered James Gattuso, regulatory policy fellow at the Heritage Institute, a think tank.
The regulatory-framework working group departed from the FTC model in one aspect, concluding that interconnection issues-sometimes the most contentious the FCC faces-may require a different approach.
Sugrue said there should be an absolute right to interconnection, but many free marketers in the room countered that would keep the FCC in the price-setting arena-something these people desperately want to change.
PFF is leading an effort to write a replacement for the Communications Act to be known as the Digital Age Communications Act. The DACA initiative is a set of five working groups dealing with spectrum policy, regulatory framework, institutional reform, universal service/social policy and the federal/state framework. The FTC proposal was presented by the regulatory framework working group.
