Benton Covers FCC DSL Ruling
BENTON’S COMMUNICATIONS-RELATED HEADLINES for MONDAY AUGUST 8, 2005 Benton Foundation
Today’s Benton newsletter has extensive coverage of last week’s FCC decision to “de-regulate” telephone companies’ Digital Subscriber Line services. Excerpt from the Wall Street Journal:
As more and more Americans turn to high-speed connections, or broadband, for their access to the Internet, the power of the phone and cable companies that provide this access has grown. Technology has evolved allowing the broadband companies to block Web sites from their customers. If they start using this power to promote their own commercial content offerings and weed out rivals, say critics, the innovative and free-wheeling Web could be crippled. So far, evidence of such tinkering is scarce, and broadband providers — and many regulators — scoff that the market would never let them censor the Web. But conflicts of interest have arisen in the past when owners of information pipelines have incentives to favor one company over another. Airlines, for instance, built the original computer-reservation services for travel agencies, and programmed them to push flights by the airline that owned the system to the top of agents’ screens — until the government intervened in 1984. On Friday, the FCC waded into the debate when it issued new rules for data services provided by telephone companies. The new rules release phone companies from an obligation to share their high-speed Internet lines, known as DSL, with rival providers of Internet service. The move, a victory for Bell companies, puts them on an equal footing with cable-television providers, which offer their own version of high-speed Internet through cable connections. But critics say the unanimous FCC decision strips away some of the rules designed to protect consumers’ rights — including the ability to freely access the Internet. In place of a strict policy on free access, the FCC instead on Friday issued a statement saying consumers have a right to freely use legal Internet applications and services.