How an Obama FCC will deal with major telecom issues

With new leadership soon to take over at the Federal Communications Commission, observers say the FCC is likely to be more skeptical of big telecom mergers and to embrace network neutrality rules. Although President-elect Barack Obama has yet to nominate anyone to chair the FCC when he takes office next year, telecom analyst Jeff Kagan says that a Democratic-led FCC is going to be reminiscent of the Clinton FCC in the 1990s, when government was more willing to intervene in the telecom market. Similarly, Brookings Institute senior fellow Robert Crandall says that the FCC under an Obama administration is likely to be "more populist and more concerned about concentration in media." On a practical level, this makes it likely that major mergers comparable to the AT&T-Bell South merger of 2007 and the Verizon-MCI merger of 2006 will face more intense scrutiny and will be less likely to go through without more stringent conditions. Free Press policy director Ben Scott, however, thinks that the Obama administration must not only be wary of new telecom mergers, but also be active in promoting new competition within the industry. "If you have a national broadband policy whose primary goals include promoting competition, then permitting vertical and horizontal mergers would be completely counterproductive," he says. "Were I on the FCC, I would start with an examination of what other nations have done to make their markets more competitive than ours. Particularly, I'd look at whether more spectrum can be opened up to create a new broadband pipe."