As consumer protection in the telecom industry ‘a lot of times ge...

at a seminar sponsored by CompTel and Davis Wright Tremaine Tues. in Washington. She said to serve the public interest, the Commission should focus on 3 key areas: (1) It should “trust the market crafting its regulations and allow competition to thrive.” (2) Both the agency and industry should educate consumers to allow them to “reap the benefits of increased competition.” (3) The Commission, when the market fails, “must be willing to step in and enforce our rules promptly.” Abernathy said the Commission, to better serve the public, “must strictly observe its enforcement obligations and not hesitate to act when rules are violated.” She said stringent enforcement was “crucial when we rely on market forces rather than prescriptive regulations. It is only when our rules have force that companies will think twice before violating them.” For example, Abernathy said, Enhanced 911 (E911) regulations for wireless carriers was one of the areas in which the FCC acted quickly in enforcing its rules: “We have monitored and will continue to monitor each carrier’s progress in initiating each phase of the implementation process and assess penalties for failure to comply with deployment benchmarks.” Abernathy said consumer education was “essential to our ability to regulate in the public interest.” For example, she said, fewer than half of the parents who had a TV equipped with a V-chip were aware of that, and of those who were, only 1/3 had tried to use it. Consumer education is a “significant goal” in E911 deployment effort, she said.