Twilight for Traditional Telecom Regulation? – TechKnowledge Newsletter An interesting essay on the future of telecom. Of course the rosy picture for the future has been painted before.

Slowly but surely, change is coming to the world of telecommunications regulation. While it’s easy to get pessimistic about the sluggish pace of reform in the eight years since the not-so-revolutionary Telecommunications Act of 1996 passed, recent developments prove that central planning is finally starting to give way to a future of free markets and consumer choice.

Consider that, on October 14, the Federal Communications Commission quietly promulgated a new rule allowing incumbent telephone companies to run “fiber-to-the-curb” (FTTC) lines within 500 feet of a customer’s home or office without fear of infrastructure-sharing mandates. (A previous FCC decision had already liberated “fiber-to-the-home” (FTTH), making it clear that telcos would not be forced to share lines that ran all the way to the customer’s premises.) On the same day, the FCC announced new rules allowing energy and electricity carriers to offer Broadband over Power Line (BPL) service to their customers.

Those unfamiliar with the mysteries of modern communications regulation might reasonably ask: Why does the government have any say over these decisions to begin with? Shouldn’t these companies be free to offer consumers these innovative new services without asking “Mother, May I”? Of course they should, but that’s not the way telecom regulation has long worked. In the eyes of many regulators, you are guilty of being a monopolist until proven innocent.

Yet, many regulators are finally coming to see that there is no denying the realities of our competitive communications marketplace. Shackling one set of players with unique rules no longer makes any sense in a world where every home or office has two or three wires to choose from, and wireless options too. As these two recent FCC decisions illustrate, the war over telecom is drawing to a close. But let’s step back for a moment and consider just how costly and unproductive this war has been.