Prime Time for Communications Act Rewrite, Says Silliman; Redl Says Staff Work Proceeding
LAS VEGAS -- This year and next are prime periods to pass a Communications Act rewrite, said a Verizon executive, as a key aide to House Communications Subcommittee Republicans said staff is hard at work on the issue. Verizon General Counsel Craig Silliman said on a panel at CES that there's a "two-year window here" for subcommittee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., and the administration to make the concept of modernizing a law last updated in 1996 a reality. There are "a number of people who would like to get something done," he said. Subcommittee staffers are "busily preparing" to "get out some ideas about a Communications Act update," said Chief Counsel David Redl. Horse trading among stakeholders could make it easier to pass an update to the act, he said Wednesday.
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It may take a "disruptive force" to get enough momentum to propel a rewrite, and that might have happened had Aereo not lost its Supreme Court case, said University of Pennsylvania Law School Professor Christopher Yoo. Such legislation "always takes years," said Yoo, who was reportedly considered for a Republican FCC slot (see 1305080053">1305080053). A rewrite "will happen," but it may take five or six years, he said.
Silliman and panelist Staci Pies, Google senior policy counsel, may disagree on some issues about an update to the act, but "anyone in this space would agree that the laws are outmoded," said Yoo. So what each of them contends holds true, said Yoo: Silliman is correct that technology-specific laws need to be junked, while Pies correctly says there's a "tremendous legacy of success" under current law. As a provider of over-the-top services and fiber connections for super-fast broadband, Google wants to ensure that OTT services are not "regulated in a way that fits today’s world," Pies said, but that they are overseen in a way that "looks forward toward tomorrow." She said "legacy regulations" make it difficult for fiber deployments to get access to infrastructure like conduits and poles.
Both parties may agree on an update to the act in some areas, said some panelists. Pies cited "social obligations that Americans have come to expect" as an area where there may be bipartisan accord. Silliman said stakeholders don't seem to dispute that the 1996 Telecom Act and the 1934 Communications Act were designed for markets that now are greatly different. The last Congress showed "we can do bipartisan work" on tech and telecom issues, said Redl. "It seems like we’ve got a pretty good group of folks who are committed to trying to make some of these changes."
Many responses to the subcommittee's white papers on an update of the act show that "people dislike the fact that we are so siloed," said Redl. "Let’s stop pretending that these networks are different from a use-case perspective. ... Recognizing that, I think, is one of the things that came through" in stakeholder responses to the white papers. There have been "a lot of individual meetings with folks in Washington" and other efforts "to try to get a sense of the scope of the challenge that we are facing," said Redl. He said staff is reviewing white paper responses. Standards for performance of receivers, which are nonexistent now even as signal transmission is regulated, might warrant a look, said Redl.
An update won't necessarily lead to a total rewrite, said panelists. "We used update for a very specific reason: some things here work and are here to stay," Redl said of the preferred term for the current work. Staff is following the notion behind the Hippocratic oath, "which is, first do no harm," said Redl. "Like it or not, we have a large part of our economy tied up in the existing model." He said one wouldn't want to "drag the Internet economy into a structure that it isn’t fit for, any more than you drag the existing technologies" into an inappropriate structure.