Cable, High-Tech Talk on Network Management, McSlarrow Says
Cable operators and technology companies long have discussed how to handle peer-to-peer file transfers and other broadband network-management matters, NCTA President Kyle McSlarrow said. Those talks, mostly between single companies, predate by months, sometimes years, Thursday’s P2P settlement between BitTorrent and Comcast (CD March 28 p1), he said in an interview. Talks did “accelerate somewhat recently” amid an FCC inquiry into whether Comcast violated commission Internet openness principles by allegedly blocking P2P transfers using BitTorrent. Announcing their agreement, the companies said they were talking with unspecified other businesses that McSlarrow declined to identify.
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Aides to FCC Commissioners Michael Copps and Robert McDowell -- addressing the Association of Cable Communicators, to which McSlarrow also spoke -- said their bosses support the efforts. “All stakeholders need to be involved in that discussion,” said Copps aide Rick Chessen. “Case by case” decision-making is best, he added. McDowell is “hopeful that there are more private-sector solutions to this,” said his media aide, Cristina Pauze. “His preference would be to see all the players in this to get together to make the Internet more successful.”
Cable executives should speak with counterparts in other industries to strike deals in place of regulation, McSlarrow said. “This isn’t just a cable issue,” he said. “This is one of those times where network providers, technology companies and applicators of technology need to step up and show the government that we actually are on top of this.” Discussions between individual companies avoid antitrust questions, said McSlarrow. Forums for discussions with more players include the Internet Engineering Task Force, he said. Many executives from other industries approached McSlarrow after he spoke out on broadband network management, he said. “I've had this series of meetings sort of around the clock with a lot of people who I frankly hadn’t been talking to just to sort of see where the ideas are. I think it’s still early days” of such talks.
FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and the cable industry itself share blame for scrutiny on cable practices ranging from network management and pricing to channel bundling, McSlarrow said. “We still haven’t quite punched through in a way that sticks in terms of what our industry has done for consumers,” he said. Complaints over cable rates and customer service are “legacy issues” affecting programmers and operators whose response sometimes is “a little ragged,” McSlarrow added.
Regulatory worries about cable rates won’t go away, said McSlarrow. “This is not a policy debate that you ‘win,'” because it’s complicated to explain why prices rise and why selling channels individually, as Martin wants, won’t cut customer bills, he said. (See separate report in this issue.) “We've sort of had this public back and forth between Chairman Martin and me” on a la carte, McSlarrow said.
Martin’s concern about cable rates reflects consumers’ outlook, said an FCC spokeswoman. She cited a near-doubling in rates the past decade while prices for other telecom services declined. “Our focus is not on the welfare of a particular industry, but the welfare of consumers who are not seeing the benefits of lower prices and more choices,” she added. “Yes, the chairman is concerned about cable rates.”
“The elephant in the room is we have a fairly hostile FCC chairman, and that’s what’s keeping us fairly busy,” McSlarrow said. But the other four commissioners and many legislators have been receptive to cable’s lobbying, he said. “We've had a lot of allies step up to the plate to help us for the past three years” -- McSlarrow’s tenure at NCTA and Martin’s as chairman. “As powerful as the FCC chairman is, he’s only one vote,” McSlarrow said. “This is a given, this is what it’s going to be like while he’s chairman. There’s nothing we could do that’s good enough.”
Although it’s “long past time” to slash FCC regulation of wireline providers of telecommunications services, McSlarrow said, Congress probably won’t do so in 2008. But lawmakers in both parties want “process reforms” at the FCC, urging more transparency -- goals McSlarrow shares, he said. “Regardless of who wins the presidency and who wins Congress, the big issue revolves around broadband deployment,” he said. “There is fairly wide bipartisan support” for the proposition that broadband expansion powers economic growth.