WorldCom's Vint Cerf Reiterates Call For Pro-Competitive Broadband Policies

SUPERCOMM -- ATLANTA, Ga., June 3, 2002 -- Broadband policies under consideration in Washington could have a "profoundly negative impact on the Internet and the availability of high-capacity telecommunications connections necessary to its current and future openness and competitive nature," Vint Cerf, WorldCom senior vice president of Architecture and Technology, said today. In a keynote address to telecommunications industry professionals attending the SuperComm show in Atlanta, Cerf reiterated concerns regarding U.S. broadband policy that he recently communicated in letters to Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans and FCC Chairman Michael Powell.

"Unfortunately, I am beginning to see troubling signs that the FCC's pro-competitive legacy, and the resulting benefits to American consumers and businesses, may be in serious jeopardy," said Cerf, who is widely regarded as an Internet founder for his role in co-developing the TCP/IP protocol and the architecture of the Internet. "Over the past few months, the FCC has initiated several interrelated rulemaking proceedings that appear to have at their core the single-minded but mistaken notion that open, nondiscriminatory telecommunications platforms no longer serve the public interest when they are used to provide so-called "broadband" services."

Cerf reemphasized a central point in his letters to the FCC and Commerce Department -- that open, nondiscriminatory telecommunications platforms are vital to the development of competition in all communications services, including broadband.

"Preventing competitive telephone companies from leasing elements of the incumbent carriers' networks at cost-based rates to provide competing services, and barring Internet service providers from utilizing the underlying telecommunications services necessary to serve consumers, could deny competitors the very capabilities they need to survive, let alone flourish, in the market," Cerf said. "Such an approach would effectively wall off the local telephone network from competitive entry and eviscerate any chance of fostering competition and innovation in these interrelated worlds."

Cerf added that the FCC appears to base its suggested approach on a few key mistaken 'factual' premises. These include the misguided notions that:

• "broadband" is a different sort of animal from "narrowband" that does not require appropriate regulation in order to protect consumers and businesses from monopoly abuses;
• robust "intermodal" competition exists or soon will exist between different facilities-based providers of broadband services; and
• the incumbent local phone companies in particular require additional incentives to deploy Digital Subscriber Line ("DSL")-based broadband services.

"From this engineer's perspective, none of these assumptions has any merit," Cerf declared. "There appears to be no viable reason to step back from the requirements of the [1996 Telecommunications] Act, the FCC's own pro-competitive legacy, and the pro-competitive economic policies of the Bush Administration, to embrace a future where, at best, consumers can only receive what unregulated monopolies and/or duopolies are willing to give them."

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