Panelists at an AEI-Brookings Joint Center debate in Washington s...

be a significant and beneficial piece in the overall solution” to encouraging buildout of high-speed Internet infrastructure. He said such tax relief should be extended to incumbents and CLECs as well as to other potential facilities-based competitors, including real estate owners, municipal govts. and nonprofit universities. Ferguson criticized ILECs for what he said was failure of phone monopolies to achieve meaningful technological growth over last decade, emphasizing that DSL deployment by telcos didn’t count as advanced technological change. He also recommended structural separation as possible solution to anticompetitive behavior. Although he criticized ILEC industry, he said policymakers “should be skeptical about cable” as primary alternative source of broadband and telephony services because: (1) Cable passed much lower percentage of businesses than residences. (2) Cable technology provided excellent delivery of bandwidth to, but not from, customers seeking 2-way broadband. Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Thomas Hazlett said mandatory network sharing as regulatory means of sparking competition was “doomed for failure,” evident by abrupt end of dot-com and CLEC booms of nineties. He agreed DSL hadn’t lived up to industry’s expectations, but attributed that failure not to poor service but to unbundling obligations imposed by FCC. He said cable was leading broadband service race in large part because deregulation enabled industry to set standards for cable modem manufacturers, unlike DSL providers, that had to “worry about interoperability because of unbundling requirements.” He said approach taken via Tauzin-Dingell data deregulation bill (HR-1542), which would remove network access requirements from newly deployed infrastructure, was “entirely appropriate [as was] the FCC approach to blocking unbundling requirements for cable.”