The FCC’s role in regulating the communications industry,...
The FCC’s role in regulating the communications industry, including net neutrality, needs to be reduced to reflect a more competitive marketplace, said Robert Litan, director of research at Bloomberg Government, in an interview for C-SPAN’s The Communicators which was set…
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for telecast Saturday. Litan and Hal Singer, managing director at Navigant Economics, were on the program to discuss their book, The Need for Speed: A New Framework for Telecommunications Policy for the 21st Century. “In a world in which now we have convergence and we have a lot more competition, there’s less need for regulation” on issues like net neutrality. The FCC’s net neutrality order is “too radical, too harsh” in dealing with possible issues of discrimination in priority delivery contracts between network providers and websites, Singer said. He argued the order should be reversed, with discrimination issues dealt with “after the fact” by administrative law judges. There is more competition in the telecom industry than when AT&T had a monopoly on telephone service, but that “doesn’t necessarily mean that there is adequate competition,” Michael Weinberg, senior staff attorney at pro-regulatory Public Knowledge, told us. “If that’s your bar, then all sorts of things are going to look competitive. It is more competitive than an absolute monopoly, but I don’t think that means it’s adequately competitive.” While Litan and Singer are critical of the FCC in The Need for Speed, they note that the commission is only carrying out Congress’s instructions, Singer said. “The direction is going to have to come from Congress in recognition of the new landscape,” he said.