As debate continues over Telecom Act efficacy,(CD Feb 7 p5), the ...

6 p.m. Union Station reception sponsored by CompTel. “The Act’s reputation has waxed and waned with the fortunes of the communications sector,” said Harold Furchtgott-Roth, who organized the AEI conference. The Act was “adored” from 1996 to about 2000 -- boom years that saw the value of publicly- traded securities grow by hundreds of billions of dollars, he wrote in a Tues. N.Y. Sun column. “Since 2001, the communications sector has struggled and so has the Act’s reputation,” he said. CompTel Pres. Earl Comstock, who as a Senate staffer helped draft the Act, said it paved the way for entrepreneurs such as CompTel’s members “to bring technological innovation to the marketplace and choice to consumers.” But FCC’s implementation of the law was “a failure,” Comstock said. In an interview, he listed many aspects he finds lacking in agency rules. The FCC didn’t limit the E-rate funding program to telecom services, as the Act’s framers planned, but included other services as well, he said. The FCC’s “original steps to open the local [telecom] market to competition were correct” but the agency then “undermined the Telecom Act” by stipulating different treatment for circuit-switched services and packet-switched services, Comstock said. The agency’s definition of DSL as an information service will make it hard to support universal service, he said. Congress viewed the basic transmission on which information services ride as a regulated telecom service, he said. As a result of FCC deregulatory actions, “none of the provisions Congress spent so much time developing apply to Internet access,” he said. The FCC “eviscerated the statute by defining carriers out of it.” Telecom analyst Scott Cleland said he thinks “the Telecom Act got the big idea right -- ending monopoly, promoting competition and encouraging new technology -- but the implementation was a disaster and contributed to the CLEC bubble.” It was risky for the FCC to try “to delay Bell entry [into long distance service] until a CLEC industry could be created,” Cleland said: “It was a huge failure in government to try to create a market that did not respect supply and demand.”