Broadband Technology Not Moving Too Fast for Regulators to Keep Up, Says FCC Chief Technologist

FCC Chief Technologist Henning Schulzrinne disputed the idea that regulation can’t keep up with the pace of technological change. Schulzrinne spoke Thursday at the opening of a symposium sponsored by the agency and The Institute for Information Policy (IIP) at Pennsylvania State University on the future of broadband regulation (http://fcc.us/1k4cfb9).

The “notion that technology moves rapidly or that a new technology is just around the corner” shouldn’t be used as an “excuse for inaction,” Schulzrinne said. Technological advances aren’t unpredictable, he said. “The notion that technology evolves too rapidly for policy rulemakings ... is far too facile,” he said. Communications technology is also more stable than many other technologies, he said.

There’s too much of a tendency to see technological advantages as arriving fully formed, rather than developing over many years, Schulzrinne said. “One day Facebook didn’t exist and the next day every newspaper tech reporter had to write an article about it,” he said. That doesn’t mean the “gestation” happened quickly, he said. “Core infrastructure innovation” happens “by necessity” at a slow pace, he said. “The things we see as relatively new have been with us for many years.”

On computing technology, we're likely to reach the end of Moore’s law “relatively quickly, if we haven’t already,” Schulzrinne said. Moore’s law holds that over the history of computing hardware the number of transistors on integrated circuits approximately doubles every two years.

House Commerce Committee Majority Chief Counsel David Redl, who also spoke Thursday, said what many view as rapid advances in technology is really a rapid advance in technology adoption. “Biometrics have been around for a long time, but the average American doesn’t know what biometrics is,” he said. Adoption of technologies presents “a real policy challenge” for the statutes that govern the FCC and the industry itself, he said.

The rules for cable operators, wireless carriers, Regional Bell Operating Companies and CLECs are different even though consumers increasingly view the services as a substitute for each other, Redl said. “I find myself relying more on the broadband from my wireless devices than I do on the broadband at my desk,” he said. “That wasn’t the case four years ago and the adoption of these technologies has really animated the way we look at how to move forward on the Communications Act update.”

As the House looks at a Communications Act rewrite, “we're going to be getting in the weeds, we're going to be getting very far in the weeds,” Redl said. “That’s just a necessity.”

Just because a company is a monopoly doesn’t mean it has to be regulated, “not because you can’t imagine a welfare gain out there because there’s a feasibility problem,” FCC Chief Economist Tim Brennan said. “How do you know what the costs are? How do you know, when something is changing quite rapidly, what the product even is?”

Is broadband more like a water pipe, that can be buried and forgotten, or more like a computer operating system “where you're depending upon some continuing innovation, expansion?” Brennan asked.