That’s what Vonage’s Jeffrey Citron pushed for during the Aspen Summit’s telecom roundtable, and he wants it be the Law of the Land. This Bill of Rights would place into law what types of Internet access and service a broadband user could expect.
Citron has a vested interest because in a few instances Vonage’s VOIP services have been blocked by ISPs that offered a competing service. On one level, he has a point. There would probably be a hue and cry if Google blocked access to Yahoo! Or of a phone company’s 411 service blocked access to phone numbers of its competitors.
So, in this Bill of Rights, the law would prohibit an ISP from blocking access to a website. Sounds good, right? Well, dig a little deeper and it gets tricky....
...For example, there are family-oriented ISPs out there that block access to porn sites. Under the Broadband Bill of Rights, they would be barred from blocking those sites.
Good luck getting that through the FCC and Congress. Just look at what happened last week. A new domain name, .xxx for porn sites, was all set to be launched until it got media attention. Once it did, the Department of Commerce, which must approve it, got bombarded with angry emails from citizens demanding that it be stopped.
SBC, Verizon, and the National Cable Television Association all supported the ideas of the principles, but were dubious about making it the law of the land. SBC’s Forrest Miller summed it up when he questioned making “principles cats in stone and locked forever.”
The larger point of Aspen’s telecom roundtable was about what will be the new telecom regulatory structure now that Cable is getting into voice and the Bells into video.
There, we saw no agreement. Clearly, the FCC has signaled that it wants to revamp its approach to regulating the industry – and focus it more on services than industry. That would mean that Bells and Cable would be regulated based on what they are offering – voice, video, data services.
While no one said this during the panel, its clear from hallway talk both here in Aspen and in Washington that the prospects for a Telecom rewrite are fading for this Congress.
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