It’s coming – next week some time.
From a wire report:
Having watched the FCC for years from the viewpoint of the Senate Commerce Committee, McCain thinks the agency shouldn’t be drafting rules for new markets, [Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a senior domestic policy advisor for the McCain presidential campaign] said. Instead, McCain wants the FCC to function more like the Federal Trade Commission, which analyzes the impact of companies’ endeavors before it acts.
So as you enjoy your weekend, think for a moment about what an FCC without rulemaking authority would be able, or unable, to do. Feel free to fulminate in the comments here – in either direction.
It’s hard to fashion a new model for “light” regulation. We dismembered AT&T using Bill Baxter’s structural separation model, but that didn’t work because the world changed and analog telephony became obsolete. So then FCC “freed” the telcos and cablecos and Supremes sustained in Brand X, but the ink was hardly dry when moguls like Ed Whitacre said, “It’s my network and I decide how it’s used.” We definitely don’t like that as long as 90% of residential broadband is controlled by a duopoly. NN is really a proxy for the underlying economic problem of excessive market control.
Will the Internet route around the duopoly and make our fears irrelevant? Does the public interest require a fiber to the home strategy with same digital highway access assumptions as the vehicle access rules for the streets in front of our homes?