Paul Kapustka's Blog
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June 13, 2006
Reed Hundt rebuts Steve Forbes
Publishing magnate and erstwhile Presedential candidate Steve Forbes showed yesterday why nobody should trust him beyond his own magazine pages -- in an editorial for the Wall Street Journal, Forbes attempted to explain why net neutrality was bad, but contradicted himself in a single paragraph with a mis-representation of the facts that former FCC chairman Reed Hundt ably rebuts in an email reply.
In his Journal piece, titled "Ominous Neutrality," Forbes rehashes a lot of the standard telco pitch (including the humorous reference to "well-financed lobbyists" pushing for net neutrality, as if somehow the Bell army of lawyers and influence-peddlers wasn't the overwhelming Beltway presence). But Forbes truly steps in it when he tries to blame the 1996 Telecom Act for our current broadband woes. To quote:
Passing Network Neutrality legislation would be a re-run of the disastrous Telecom Act of 1996 which forced telecom companies to provide network access to competitors at below market prices. That certainly put a chill on network innovation. After years of wasteful lawsuits and regulatory infighting, the network access monster has gone away. But it was a big factor in letting America slip into the high-tech Stone Age, with consumer broadband services lagging far behind what's available in countries like Japan or South Korea.
I suspected Forbes had his facts not just wrong but in contradiction, so I emailed Hundt for confirmation and got this reply:
I don't know if the proposed Net Neutrality bill is a good or bad bill because I haven't studied it. I do know, having spent last week in Japan, that the reason Japan is far ahead of the United States in ADSL specifically and broadband generally is precisely because they adopted the line sharing and other pro competitive regulations of the FCC of the 90s. The companies and Japanese regulators told me this in detail all last week, since, to my surprise, I am the father of the current Japanese regulatory paradigm.
Instead of serving up lukewarm offerings from backward-thinkers like Forbes, why doesn't the WSJ take a closer look at ideas like Hundt's call to have government and private businesses partner in building out fiber to every home in the U.S.?
Yes, it will cost all of us money. But it's better than waiting for AT&T and Verizon to come to our broadband rescue, isn't it?
Posted by paul at June 13, 2006 09:28 AM