From Neutrality, Copyright to USF, Wi-Fi, Boucher Sees Busy Year
House IP Subcommittee Chmn. Berman’s (D-Cal.) “differing orientation” on copyright isn’t keeping Rep. Boucher (D-Va.) from believing his sometimes-lonely crusade to bolster copyright fair use will bear fruit this year. That’s because Boucher has influence elsewhere. He’s on the verge of introducing another “very broad” Universal Service Fund bill that would include broadband in the program, Boucher told us. He expects little opposition to his municipal Wi-Fi bill, originally in 2006’s telecom bill (HR-5252) as a stand-alone measure this Congress, despite telco qualms, he said. Failure to resolve net neutrality will kill broader telecom legislation, like last year, he said -- clarifying his comments on neutrality at a recent State of the Net conference, which sparked wide speculation.
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Don’t let his chairing the Air Policy Subcommittee on House Commerce fool you, Boucher said: “I have a full agenda on telecom issues,” serving on House Telecom and co-chairing the Internet Caucus. Ranking just behind Rep. Markey (D-Mass.) for House Telecom Subcommittee chmn., Boucher said he wasn’t disappointed to lose out on the top spot: “It was pretty clear that Ed was going to do that all along.”
USF reform is the “first thing” on Boucher’s plate, he said. His bill, “almost ready to go” after resolution of a “few outstanding issues” with “a couple” of big companies, would provide new revenue sources for the fund, control costs and codify that USF can be used to deploy broadband. Expect a March introduction, Boucher said. The bill probably won’t help resolve the neutrality tangle, since first-time broadband deployment would feature slower speeds, perhaps only 750 kbps, he said.
Boucher also plans to reintroduce his bill to let local govts. offer telecom services, mostly for broadband. Big-city Wi-Fi projects -- and their nagging cost problems -- are overshadowing successful small-town projects. A town of 400 in his district has been offering free Wi-Fi about a year and “it’s getting a lot of use,” he said, calling new mesh network architectures “easily affordable.” Telco opposition is fading amid rollout of wireless broadband with greater range and more reliability, Boucher said: “Someone who really needs wireless broadband on a continual basis is more likely to sign up with one of the commercial providers.” Warning that telcos may oppose a “free-standing bill” not coupled with video-franchising relief, like last year, Boucher nonetheless called opposition “not all that great.”
Boucher’s stated concern about keeping net neutrality laws from threatening innovation (CD Feb 1 p2) has been “broadly misinterpreted,” he said. He’s not suddenly skeptical about neutrality, but simply saying that if broadband providers “can prove there’s an issue there [with slowing innovation], we certainly ought to be listening to them… So far there just hasn’t been a discussion… just one camp or another.” Boucher again declined to specify compromise proposals he’s heard from Microsoft and FCC Chmn. Martin, which “potentially could serve as fruitful areas to explore.” FTC Comr. Jon Leibowitz recently proposed a “3rd pipe” option for providers that can show preferential services would be “procompetitive” (CD Feb 14 p2).
“Without putting a fine detail to this,” a remedy short of regulating neutrality would be to “elevate bandwidths across the last mile” to 50-100 Mbps, Boucher said. That way providers would have no scarcity-based reason to prioritize traffic. That’s so in Japan and S. Korea, where speeds are higher and prices lower, though population density and govt. funding of infrastructure also figure into their broadband economics, Boucher acknowledged.