FCC Waits to See on Broadband

Deborah A. Lathen, chief of the cable services bureau at the Federal Communications Commission, will deliver a luncheon speech today at the Hotel Inter-Continental about the agency’s policy on broadband Internet access.

Lathen has been asked by FCC Chairman William Kennard to help monitor this hot-button issue. The emerging technology is a focal point for Internet service providers, Baby Bells, cable companies and local governments, all with different agendas on how and whether this technology should be subject to an open and free market or be largely dominated by cable companies. The FCC believes that imposing any specific regulations would slow the deployment of these high-speed services into consumers’ homes.

Lathen, who received her law degree from Harvard University and counts cable’s Sci-Fi channel, “Star Trek” reruns and C-SPAN among her favorite TV fare, was lured to the FCC by Kennard after a decade of legal work in Southern California.

Before coming to the FCC, Lathen served as the director of national consumer affairs at Nissan Motor Corp. in Carson, where she negotiated a joint venture with Ford Motor Co. Lathen eventually became a director at Nissan. Before Nissan, Lathen was a senior counsel at TRW in Orange, where she specialized in litigation.

Some critics have faulted Kennard for hiring a cable bureau chief with no previous experience in communications law. But both Kennard and Lathen reject that view, noting that many FCC officials, including former Chairman Reed Hundt, did well at the agency despite having had no previous communications experience. “Deborah is a smart, bottom-line manager, whose diverse business experience brings a fresh perspective to policymaking,” Kennard said.

Lathen, a self-assured but casual manager who will often debate issues with her feet propped up on a table, spoke with the Los Angeles Times last week in a small conference room near her FCC office in Washington.

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Question: What will you be telling your audience in the speech you will be giving in Los Angeles?

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Answer: It is going to be a great opportunity for me to explain what the FCC’s national policy is on the broadband access issue. There’s been a debate nationwide on this issue. And as you know, they are about to begin oral argument in Portland [Ore.] in the 9th Circuit Court on it. So there’s been a lot of debate but also a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding out there. So I want to talk about what our policy is--that it is the policy of forbearance--and why we have that policy.

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Q Do you think the FCC’s policy of not interfering with the broadband market has contributed to the misinformation you say is out there?

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A No, I honestly don’t. I think there are many parties involved in this debate with many different agendas. And I think that in many instances the proponents have cast the government and the FCC as being for closed systems. And I want to make it perfectly clear--that is not what we are about. We believe in open systems. . . . We know that the Internet holds great promise. The promise to be able to make it easier to educate people, the promise of connecting us . . . and we want to make certain that all Americans get those things and that they get them right away.

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Q Does the FCC’s policy of forbearance mean that the market can take care of itself? And that the agency will never intervene to promote broadband access?

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A The biggest misconception [is] that the FCC favors a closed system. The chairman [of the FCC] has repeatedly stated that we want an open broadband system, and I think we are in agreement with the local franchising authorities, state regulators and even people in industry on that issue. So we advocate a policy of “vigilant restraint.” We are in a universe now of 30 million Internet subscribers, of which 1 million have [high-speed] cable Internet access and 200,000 have DSL [telephone digital subscriber line access]. But this is just the jumping-off point. So we feel it is way too soon to impose a regulatory regime when we don’t know how the market is going to develop yet.

There is also a misconception that we don’t have a policy because I think people have gotten so used to the government acting or always doing something. The mere fact that we are forbearing should not be misinterpreted to mean that we don’t have a policy. We have a policy. It is a national policy. We can’t have thousands of local [cable] franchising authorities coming up with different regulations in this area. That is something that will hamper and slow down the Internet and stifle creativity and innovation.

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Q America Online and AT&T; have their differences over the broadband access issue. AOL contends AT&T; is not building an open system and will force AOL users to pay more to reach AOL over high-speed cable lines.

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A This isn’t just about AOL and AT&T.; We want to get this technology deployed fast and make certain all Americans get it. We want more than one pipeline into the home. I think SBC [the parent company of Pacific Bell] just announced it is going to deploy DSL to 77 million subscribers in 13 states. So, you see, it’s not just about the cable companies. It’s about promoting more competition.

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Q Critics say that if you wait to see how the market develops, you might be facing a situation similar to the one the government now faces in the Microsoft antitrust case. A lot of people argue that the government could have avoided the huge cost of the Microsoft case by intervening much earlier. What factors might raise concern by the FCC that its hands-off policy may not work? For example, if an even greater disparity developed between the wiring of rural and urban areas for high-speed Internet access, would that cause the FCC to intervene? Or if the Internet access divide were to grow between rich and poor neighborhoods?

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AWe want to bridge the gap between the haves and the have-nots. We want to make certain everybody comes along on the information superhighway. . . . When we do our merger reviews, we look very closely at these questions. We ask the companies for timetables so that we can vigilantly monitor how well they do in meeting them.

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Q What’s been the public reaction to this issue of high-speed Internet access? Has it eclipsed things such as cable-rate regulation? Give us a sense of how your mail and faxes have been running.

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A The best example I can give you is when I went to my doctor not too long ago and he asked me: “I keep hearing about this debate about high-speed Internet access. What is this all about? What does this mean? What is broadband? What is high-speed Internet access?” A lot of people in the technical world understand the issues. The lobbyists understand it. But from a lot of other people, all you hear is a sense of confusion. They don’t even understand what the debate is all about. . . . So when I go out in public, I still get those questions about “my cable bill.”