Bill would stall the revolution

Bill would stall the revolution
by Susan Molinari
Sun-Sentinel (FL)
03/23/07

Time magazine may have labeled “you” its 2006 person of the year, but 2007 is quickly shaping up to be the year of high-speed Internet, or broadband, the platform on which all of the Web’s wonders — medicine, education and what Time called “community and collaboration on a scale never seen before” — is delivered to homes and businesses throughout the nation.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission reports that broadband use is rapidly rising in America, up 52 percent in just one year, and as more and more homes have access to affordable high-speed Internet the positive effects multiply. Students from Nome collaborate with their peers in Miami, and workers displaced by the “flattening” global marketplace access new training tools needed to compete.

So it is absolutely essential that we address telecommunications policy with care and diligence, so as to ensure that the broadband nation continues to reach far and wide. Yet, this is what we put at risk by pursuing statewide video franchising legislation like HB 529, the Consumer Choice Act of 2007, that rips apart existing broadband nondiscrimination rules and tilts the marketplace in the favor of one competitor over another.

As they are currently written, the nation’s telecommunications laws authorize local cities, towns and counties to oversee the equitable deployment of video and broadband networks. As the U.S. Congress has repeatedly recognized, these rules make sense, since who else but city fathers is going to prevent telecom companies from building only to the wealthiest cul-de-sacs and slicing a thick red line between the haves and have-nots in the name of profit?

Today’s telecommunications giants, however, contend that local officials are a great “barrier” to new competition in the video market, the only thing standing between consumers and lower monthly bills. So in return for investments in new fiber-optic video networks, telecom executives demand that Florida strip local officials of their consumer protection authority in favor of a new state bureaucracy.

Yet, abiding by these demands will likely slow the growth of the broadband nation and bring little price relief for consumers.

Telephone companies contend that they should be exempt from current rules to which their competitors remain bound. However, treating companies to different rules could result in a local marketplace resembling a house divided against itself in which two competitors serve subsets of customers rather than vigorously challenging one another for all city customers on equal terms.

Far from a “barrier,” localities have welcomed new video competitors. Verizon has easily obtained franchises covering nearly 8 million U.S. households but only offers video service to 30 percent of them, and AT&T has franchises covering 60 percent of its national footprint yet only offers video service in an even smaller fraction of select markets.

Claims that video franchising “reform” will sprinkle consumers with the fairy dust of lower cable bills are equally fantastical. As the fourth or fifth video provider in most markets, telephone companies will only marginally increase competition. Their performance in a few markets so far has resulted in only greater price hikes for video services — and their executives have promised Wall Street that no “price war” would be in store, and that in fact competing with cable companies on price “doesn’t make sense to us.”

It’s bad enough that the FCC, through its Section 621 Order, is aiming to make eunuchs out of our nation’s locally elected officials; the last thing we need is for Florida to follow suit with an equally egregious slap in the face of the public servants working to bring competition that doesn’t eviscerate our civic principles.

Former U.S. Rep. Susan Molinari, R-NY, is co-chair of the Broadband Everywhere coalition.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/opinion/sfl-23forum60mar23,0,1102725.story?coll=sfla-news-opinion

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