Today’s FCC: butt cheek fines and ala carte cable trumps enforcing the 1996 telecom agreement

Overseeing the world’s largest communications market could get a lot easier if the FCC doesn’t get their act together soon. Why? Because the US market will cease to be the largest if the present policy continues. The agency recently sought to fine ABC for a broadcast breifly showing butt cheeks in 2003 and has been pushing for a la carte cable channels (a good idea, but enable TVoIP with fat broadband pipes and the market will do it). What they have not done is enforce a 1996 agreement with the Telcos that was supposed to bring big investments in last mile infrastructure and open access for competetion:

In 1996, the government agreed to free the Baby Bells to compete in the long-distance market if they met certain conditions. Among other things, the Bells promised to share their facilities with other providers and pledged to run fiber to every home. “Almost every one of them reneged on their promises,” says David Passmore, an analyst at Burton Group.

Ironically, the rate relief the carriers were given over the years in return for their empty promises — by some estimates as high as $70 billion — would have gone a long way toward running fiber to every home in the U.S.

“The politicians gave away the store, and all of the networks that were paid for by the rate [payers] were handed over to the Verizons of the world,” says Passmore. source: Computerworld

Unwittingly, the FCC is shipping US jobs overseas every bit as effectively as wholesale factory closings did. The largest carriers, AT&T (aka SBC) and Verizon spent more far more capital on mergers and acquisitions than on the promised network improvements without even a harsh word from the FCC. An act of Congress won’t fix this. An executive order might. IF Mr Bush would lke to leave a more positive legacy, he could forcibly direct the FCC to enforce existing regs already on the books. We’ll recover from the naked butt cheeks most of us missed in 2003 and being forced to pay for Al Gore’s Current TV that no one watches. We will not recover from the rest of the world passing us by if we do not get serious about a 100MBPS pipe into every American home and start deploying it now.