Hats off to Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) for finally making telecom reform legislation truly meaningful, even if it is potentially at the expense of the bill itself. That is a real possibility and the paramount paradox in Stevens’ atavistic attempt to revisit federal pre-emption by finishing the job Congress began in 1993 when it took states out of the game of wireless entry and rate regulation and left them the consolation prize of “other terms and conditions.”
It’s high time we have a national debate on whether states should totally get out of the business of regulating mobile phone carriers. Give the indefatigable net neutrality controversy a rest. Net neutrality is an important issue for future wireless, maybe a modern-day analogy to the antitrust concern that fixated the late, sage Judge Harold Greene of original AT&T-breakup fame, but Silicon Valley appears to have been bested by the Bell-cable TV broadband duopoly on this one. If lawmakers want to keep ratings up, they’ll now tackle wireless federal pre-emption.
In recent years, cellular carriers and states have been dancing around the pre-emption issue like no time before. Pre-emption is playing out everywhere but in Congress, which drew the jurisdictional dividing line more than a decade ago. Now battle lines over pre-emption have been drawn with the release of Stevens’ telecom bill. We’ll hear the arguments for and against pre-emption in the coming weeks and months. In reality, the arguments matter little for the most part. It’s all politics from this point on.
Stevens is no neophyte in legislative matters messy and mischievous. While including pre-emption in an innocent-enough-sounding section-“Federal Review”-near the end of the 159-page telecom bill, Stevens knows pre-emption is political dynamite and a possible deal-breaker. Perhaps that is the point. Maybe Stevens, previously reluctant to tangle with pre-emption, added the wireless language so it could be dropped later when lawmakers get serious about negotiating a final product.
Undoubtedly Stevens’ staff was under relentless pressure from CTIA, with fed pre-emption being the No. 1 telecom reform priority of the cell phone association and the biggest challenge yet for No. 1 industry lobbyist Steve Largent. It is doubtful CTIA’s heavyweight members will cut Largent slack for getting powerful pre-emption verbiage in the Senate bill if it disappears later in its legislative journey. Heading into last week’s markup in the Senate Commerce Committee, there were more than 200 amendments in the queue. Death by a thousand cuts?
On the other hand, if he pulls it off, Largent will be forever out of the shadow of Tom Wheeler.
