State utilities panel majority opposes phone deregulation bill

Most members of the California Public Utilities Commission said they opposed an AT&T-backed bill to deregulate some basic telephone service.

SACRAMENTO - Four out of five members of a divided California Public Utilities Commission are strongly criticizing a bill moving unopposed through the Legislature that would strip the agency of its last vestige of authority to regulate some basic telephone services.

The members debated Thursday however did not vote to oppose legislation by the powerful chairman of the Senate Energy, Utilities and Telecommunications Committee at the behest of AT&T, Verizon Communications and a number of high-tech business groups.

Passage of the bill, SB 1161 by Sen. Alex Padilla, is needed to create certainty for California's economically dynamic high-tech and Internet companies, supporters said. They need to know that California won't try to regulate or constrain growth of their industry.

"This bill would in essence prohibit the CPUC from regulating both voice-over-Internet-Protocol and Internet Protocol services," she said. "That's in the extreme problematic because many of the telephone carriers have been for nearly a decade using the Internet within their networks to move plain old telephone service calls."

What's more, Commissioner Michael Florio stressed that the commission always has maintained "a light touch" regulating voice-over-Internet service and has never attempted to oversee the Internet.

The Internet

"Nobody is talking about regulating the Internet," he said. "It's just a political slogan that has no basis in reality whatsoever."

Only Commission President Michael R. Peevey was hesitant to criticize the bill and go against the wishes of the state's high-tech business community.

The commission itself deregulating land-line

With the commission itself deregulating land-line and wireless phone service, the door was always left open for the agency to re-regulate the industry, should that be needed henceforth. The proposed law would eliminate that option and, critics said, go furthermore.

The bill could do away with even that limited regulation over quality and availability, they said, because voice-over-Internet-Protocol research is so pervasive that even conventional copper-wire handsets depend on the Internet to complete most calls. VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) is at the heart of all cable phone systems as so then as fiber-optic service from telecoms and long-distance networks.

The last 4 years

My AT&T base charge for land line phone service has gone up 50% in the last 4 years. That doesn't include the DSL charge increases. Big monopoly will always find a way to charge clients more for the same or less service.