Will Obama's FCC be Less Friendly to Incumbents?

The Obama-Biden transition team has disclosed that Susan Crawford, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, and Kevin Werbach, a former FCC staffer and a Wharton professor, will lead the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Review team. Both are long-time net neutrality advocates.

Industry pundits say the choice of Crawford and Werbach could signal a different approach to the incumbent-friendly telecom policymaking over the past eight years at the FCC. Indeed, in March at a telecom policy conference in Hollywood, Calif., Crawford said that Internet access is a "utility."

Crawford also told Ambassador Richard Russell, the associate director on science and technology policy at the White House, that he lived in a fantasyland when he asserted that the United States' rollout of broadband is going well.

"I think it's magical thinking to imagine that we're somehow doing fine here, and I just want to make sure that we recognize that even the [International Telecommunications Union] says that between 1999 and 2006 we skipped form third to 20th place in penetration," she said. "We're not doing at all well for reasons that mostly have to do with the fact that we failed to have a U.S. industrial policy pushing forward high-speed internet access penetration, and there's been completely inadequate competition in this country for high speed Internet access."

Some would argue that rankings between countries don't mean anything because small countries are easier to wire than big countries. After all, comparisons between large countries and Iceland (with a population of 320,000) and South Korea (where everyone lives in one city) aren't very meaningful.

Furthermore, ITU statistics measure broadband by household rather than by human being. If it were the other way around, U.S. rankings would climb significantly. Also, the number of people in the workforce and retirees are not factored into the ITU's metrics, skewing the data. Nor is consumer demand.

According to a recent study by Connected Nation, for U.S. consumers the primary barrier to broadband adoption is not expense or lack of available broadband service, but a perceived lack of need (for more on this topic, see Gary Kim's web exclusive entitled, "Broadband is Demand Constrained, Not Supply Constrained).

Still, we can assume that Crawford's stance indicates that President-elect Obama's FCC will be more inclined to regulate, more inclined to enforce competition rules for smaller players, and less willing to approve mega mergers.

-- Bob Titsch