Followup: Innovation loses as NJ telecom deregulation is tabled indefinitely

Last month I noted that New Jersey was poised to lead the way toward the wireless and broadband future we've all been promised. A bill to unravel the myriad tangles of regulations which stymie innovation was on the fast track toward passage.

Then along came the luddite lobby. Grandma's party line might go away! People would have to, Gasp!, pay the actual cost of the services they used! The high quality programming you've come to expect from Public Access Cable TV could be superceded by instant access to YouTube™.

Well, it looks like Grandma's party line is safe. A once-in-a-lifetime chance to modernize New Jersey's archaic telecom regulatory scheme is now stuck in an indefinite holding pattern.

There's too much to quote. Read the whole sorry thing. It's a mealy-mouthed paean to Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt served up by pandering politicians whose backbones have long-since been surgically removed.

And sadly New Jersey, home to Bell Labs and the birthplace of modern telecommunications, will remain a technological backwater, innovation hamstrung by 19^th century regulations designed when Western Union was considered to be the cutting edge.

All those obsolete services remain protected, ostensibly for the good of consumers. New firms which might want to pioneer advanced technologies are still forced to file tariffs for party lines, rotary dialing, and ringdown circuits on the off chance Alexander Graham Bell calls up and wants to order one. Any new services need to be scrutinized by legions of bureaucrats who'll ascertain if they meet "reasonableness" tests for cost and accessiblity to low-income residents.

It's a red tape scheme tailor-made to protect the entrenched monopoly providers who've been trained to navigate the bureaucratic labyrinth. The new guy doesn't have a clue how to jump through those hoops, which of course is by design. The regulatory behemoth exists to sustain itself and the primary by-product of its hegemony is a career path which starts out as a lowly clerk at the Board of Public Utilities and ends as VP of Regulatory Affairs (complete with a sizeable staff) at Verizon or AT&T or Comcast.

Where would the need for those jobs be if the telecom industry was deregulated? Nevermind too that the requirement for government to collect a plethora of fees and taxes to support the regulatory bureaucracy would also disappear. Isn't that good for consumers?

Apparently not. One goal of the regulatory apparatus is to subsidize grandma's party line via a portion of those fees and taxes. Because otherwise Society As We Know It would collapse. Or something.

Posted at 09:48 by Chris Wysocki   [/tech]   Comments | Perm Link |
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