[Ecommerce] 17 public interest, civil rights, media reform, community media, and consumer groups sign-on letter to house commerce

[Manon Ress]

Letter to members of the House Commerce Committee urging the
Committee to protect American consumers and local communities as it
moves forward on a rewrite of the 1996 Telecommunications Act.  The
Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet is holding a
hearing today on the staff discussion draft of the legislation (you
can listen now).

http://energycommerce.house.gov/108/Hearings/11092005hearing1706/
hearing.htm
Letter:

http://www.commoncause.org/atf/cf/{FB3C17E2-CDD1-4DF6-92BE-
BD4429893665}/110905%20TELECOMM%20LETTER.PDF

Release:

http://www.commoncause.org/site/apps/nl/content2.asp?
c=3DdkLNK1MQIwG&b=3D194883&ct=3D1584137

And here's the Summary of CU and CFA testimony:

Testimony of Gene Kimmelman

Senior Director of Public Policy and Advocacy, Consumers Union

on behalf of
Consumers Union
Consumer Federation of America
November 9, 2005

For decades, consumers have suffered under monopolistic cable pricing
that has resulted in skyrocketing cable bills and fewer consumer
choices. And despite the promise of more competition in wireless and
wire line phone services, consumers have seen more consolidation and
fewer marketplace choices. But the advent of broadband now offers
tremendous opportunity to inject new and potentially vigorous
competition into the telecommunications marketplace that has become
increasingly concentrated over the past decade.

We applaud the Committee=92s efforts to modernize regulations to foster
broadband competition, technological innovation and adoption of high-
speed Internet. And we welcome the Committee=92s interest in fostering
greater consumer choice by prohibiting preemption of municipal
broadband networks that offer affordable broadband services. That
provision helps ensure that communities do not face additional
roadblocks to affordable broadband access for their residents.

Unfortunately, the draft as a whole heads in exactly the wrong
direction: it will hamper competition, stifle innovation, and do
little to promote ubiquitous affordable access to advanced services.
It suffers from the following significant weaknesses:

It fails to confront the last mile bottlenecks created by the
dominant providers=92 existing control over competition, and may in
fact foreclose opportunities for future meaningful competition in
broadband.
It relieves incumbent monopolists of key interconnection obligations
and requirements to offer just and reasonable prices, terms and
conditions to unaffiliated providers, while giving them unprecedented
ability to restrain broadband competition, and therefore phone and
video competition, offered by new market entrants.
It hands over unprecedented power to broadband providers to
discriminate among potential competitors and prevent their own
customers from freely accessing content on the Internet and to use
applications and devices of their choice. As it purports to promote
competition in voice, video and data services, it virtually ensures
that the dominant incumbents will compete only with each other while
squeezing out third party competitors.
It preempts the ability of localities to require new video entrants
build out services to all consumers in a franchise area without any
national requirements for true competition for those consumers who
could most benefit from it.
Its unenforceable anti-redlining provisions fail to offer any
meaningful consumer protection.
It federalizes all consumer protection standards and enforcement;
narrowly limits the types of standards that FCC must set, leaving out
critical existing consumer protections; preempts states from setting
their own standards; and prevents states from taking final
enforcement action for violation of even minimal federal standards.
Its minimal federal remedies require the injured party to initiate a
complaint with FCC, bear the burden of proof, and suffer through a
lengthy, cumbersome and likely unsatisfactory complaint process that
provides dominant incumbents with even more power to abuse consumers
and exclude competitors from their networks.








************************************************
Manon Anne Ress
manon.ress@cptech.org,
www.cptech.org

Consumer Project on Technology
1621 Connecticut Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20009 USA
Tel.:  +1.202.332.2670, Ext 16 Fax: +1.202.332.2673

Consumer Project on Technology
1 Route des  Morillons, CP 2100, 1211 Geneva 2, Switzerland
Tel: +41 22 791 6727

Consumer Project on Technology
24 Highbury Crescent, London, N5 1RX, UK
Tel: +44(0)207 226 6663 ex 252 Fax: +44(0)207 354 0607