Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 5, 1993 TAG: 9309290301
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ROBERT RENO
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
If a foreigner asked, ``What is America's telecommunications policy?'' who would know what to answer?
I guess you could say that it is whatever U.S. District Court Judge Harold H. Greene says it is. He's the man who dismantled American Telephone & Telegraph Co. in 1984 and who retains extensive and intrusive jurisdiction over the activities if its dismembered parts, including AT&T, the $65 billion parent, and the regional Baby Bells with $100 billion in combined annual revenues.
Of course, telecommunications policy is, like other issues of great interstate importance, under the jurisdiction of Congress. But given the thicket of issues and interests which conflict, it seems happy to abdicate this one.
The Federal Communications Commission is - theoretically, at least - the agency most concerned with how Americans communicate. But when the telecommunications industry was stood on its head nine years ago, the FCC was not to be found at the front of the forces of change.
Another way of looking at it is that the future of telephone service in America is largely in the hands of the attorney general, who will decide whether to let AT&T swallow up McCaw Cellular Communications. The deal could form the core of a combined local and long-distance wireless-communications empire standing alone from the Baby Bells, who now own 95 percent of the local market and through which nearly all cellular and long-distance calls must now be routed, at huge cost to the originating companies.
And I suppose you could also say that if the nation has anything close to a telecommunications czar, he is Bob Allen, the chairman of AT&T. Allen has turned an entrenched, regulated, culture-ridden monopoly into a fearsomely competitive technology giant perhaps capable of dictating the future of telephone service as effectively as it did between 1878 and 1984.
And somewhere in this mix of policy-makers are the agencies of the 50 states, which still heavily regulate the rates and service of that great majority of American telephone users - people who don't have pagers, car phones, faxes and data receivers, and wouldn't know how to use one if they did - to whom the telephone is still just a simple instrument connected to a wired system.
For now, the Baby Bells operate from the fortress of their huge and pervasive local monopolies. To keep them honest, there is a compelling argument for restraining them from expanding into areas of data transmission and long-distance service. But there is also a compelling argument that they should be freed from restraint as a means of keeping AT&T honest.
And so the question: Is the nation's telecommunications system moving in a direction compatible with the public interest? And the answer is: Who has the vaguest idea?
Surely, the future will be at least 50 percent determined by market forces that, however efficient, are not necessarily driven by the public interest. And the other 50 percent? It will be determined largely by accident.
\ Robert Reno writes for Newsday.
L.A. Times-Washington Post News Service
by CNB