CONVERGENCE WON’T CHANGE FCC, FORMER OFFICIALS SAY

摘要

Convergence is blurring industry distinctions, but don’t expect the FCC’s regulatory approach to change soon, former FCC officials said Thurs. at a Pulver conference. The agency has little choice but to bide its time until Congress provides clear guidance, they said. “I think the FCC will try to keep its fences mended and look to the Hill for true reform” of the regulatory distinctions between common carrier and information services, said attorney David Irwin, a former FCC Common Carrier Bureau staffer. As new technology tests traditional regulation, the FCC will be “very different looking in the next 5-10 years, but I don’t know how,” said Stagg Newman, ex- FCC chief technologist now at McKinsey & Co. “Rethinking [the definition of] `common carrier’ is probably the key issue [since] a lot of fundamentals are being broken,” Newman said. Asked to gauge the changes since he left, Irwin said “the tone is more heated and has gotten nastier.” He said FCC decisions seem “driven more by lobbyists and powerful companies than by legal precedent and statutes.”