ISPs to FCC: Let My People Flow
Michael Stroud
A top Federal Communications Commission adviser says the agency's chief is disinclined to require cable companies to open their broadband pipes. That's just what the cable industry wanted to hear, but what about consumers? Michael Stroud reports from Los Angeles.
LOS ANGELES -- Don't expect your cable company to open its lines to AOL any time soon.
Cable operators at the California Cable Television Association's 1999 Western show largely nixed the idea of open access in public comments, and FCC officials did nothing to contradict their message.
FCC chairman William Kennard "doesn't want the government mandating access," said Thomas Power, a senior legal adviser to Kennard. "He's focused instead on the deployment of broadband facilities. If you start mandating, it dries up the investment and incentives to deploy."
Once multiple broadband technologies are made available to ISPs -- cable, DSL, wireless, and satellite -- the issue of open access is largely eliminated, Powers argued. In other words, if your cable company denies you fast AOL access, DSL will happily provide it.
But suppose one of the access points didn't offer AOL because it had its own brand that it liked better? "It's a scenario we're seeking to avoid," Powers said.
That frames a key question at the Western show, whose theme this year is "Wired2K": Can users trust their local cable monopoly (or for that matter, their local phone company) to provide the digital services they choose?
It is, after all, an industry where former AT&T broadband chief Leo Hindery warned during a panel discussion Wednesday that open access would open a Pandora's Box of evils such as streaming media.
Time Warner vice chairman Ted Turner, sitting on the same panel, put it another way: Anyone can get AOL over his pipe, as long as they pay for his baseline service. There is, after all, the seemingly reasonable assumption that cable operators have the right to recoup the billions they've spent on broadband infrastructure.
Charter Communications president Jerald Kent went so far as to compare the cable industry to a McDonald's franchise forced to allow a Burger King on its lot.
Lest anyone feel too sorry for the cable companies, Bloomberg News chief executive Michael Bloomberg noted that Ted Turner still holds all the cards when Bloomberg tries to get his programming on Time Warner Cable.
"I have to make my programming so compelling that he feels like he has to put me on, even if it competes with one of his," Bloomberg said.
It's the kind of power that has spurred municipal governments regulating local cable operators to require they open their pipes to competing services.
While Power estimated that "only 10 out of thousands" of municipalities have issued such mandates, "there's a huge amount of lobbying going on at that level," he said. "AOL and AT&T are pulling out the stops."
Power gave those efforts -- and parallel forces on Capitol Hill -- little chance of success. "The vast majority of localities have followed our lead on this and not sought open access."
For Power, the right approach is to encourage multiple operators to compete for customers, although that won't necessarily make for happy customers, either.
Speaking from his own experience with satellite TV, he said: "They make the old cable company look good in terms of service."
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