Inside the GAO FCC/Telecommunications Act Study

INSIDE THE GAO FCC/TELECOMMUNICATIONS ACT STUDY
[SOURCE: Lasar's Letter on the FCC, AUTHOR: Matthew Lasar]
The United States Government and Accountability Office (GAO) chose an innocuous enough title for their just released report on voice and data competition: "FCC Needs to Improve Its Ability to Monitor and Determine the Extent of Competition in Dedicated Access Services." But that opening won't stop readers from interpreting the study as a devastating critique of the Federal Communication Commission's implementation of Telecommunications Act of 1996, or from seeing it as a historical analysis of a series of practices and policies that, in the end, have failed to deliver competitive telecom access to big cities in the United States. The GAO report includes an appendix with FCC Managing Director Anthony Dale's response to the study, which was not positive. "The GAO Draft Report," Dale wrote on November 13th, "appears to imply the need for a return to price control policies that the Commission abandoned in 1999 during the previous Administration." Dale also suggested that a more rigorous analysis of competition than the FCC's colocation system would require an "extremely narrow" focus. " . . . the GAO study seems to suggest that at least each individual building and perhaps each floor of a building needs to be considered a separate market," Dale argued, an approach that he says the FCC could not implement. But the GAO rejects the charge that the agency advocates a return to price controls, and urges the FCC to seek better data on the industries that it regulates.
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