House Delays Vote on Broadband Bill

The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday delayed a much-anticipated vote on a measure that could allow local telecommunication carriers to offer high-speed Internet access across regional boundaries without first opening their local markets to rivals.

The House will vote on the Internet Freedom and Broadband Deployment Act of 2001 in March of next year, says Ken Johnson, a spokesperson for Representative Billy Tauzin (R-Louisiana). Tauzin co-authored the bill with John Dingell (D-Michigan).

The vote had been scheduled for Friday. Tauzin and Dingell are the chair and ranking member, respectively, of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

However, the delay should not be seen as a defeat, Johnson says.

"There's going to be a lot of speculation about this, but the bottom line is that members [of Congress] wanted to go home to see their family and friends," he says. "The leadership did not have any other must-do bills on the calendar for Friday."

"This is simply a delay, not a defeat," Johnson says.

Supporting Baby Bells

The bill, H.R. 1542, is viewed as a Baby Bell-friendly proposal to deregulate broadband services. It is designed to spur nationwide deployment of broadband connections by allowing Regional Bell Operating Companies to enter the market for high-speed data services across regional boundaries.

Passage of this bill would remove the requirement imposed by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that RBOCs open up local markets to competition before entering long-distance markets.

The Energy and Commerce Committee passed the bill in May, but in June the House Judiciary Committee rejected the proposal and sent it back to the House with a suggested amendment. Members of the Judiciary Committee, who had the right to look over the bill to ensure it didn't step on antitrust or telecommunications regulations, said there was much work to do before the proposal would guarantee even competition in the broadband market. The committee approved an amendment that calls for RBOCs to be subject to antitrust review by the U.S. Department of Justice.

The bill's proponents hoped that the full House would vote on it before Congress' August break. That never happened, and following the new set of issues Congress had to deal with related to the September 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S., the bill was pushed back further.

Critics say that the bill would favor RBOCs at the expense of competitive local exchange carriers, Internet service providers, and long-distance giants such as AT&T. They fear that RBOCs could use their control over local markets to stifle competition, and that these local providers should open their networks to competitors before being allowed to compete at the national level.