Today was a long day of panels, with no wireless.  And so I paid full attention.

(I was lucky to be able to start my own presentation with a situational joke.  Last night, when I tried to send my slides to the conference organizer using the hotel wireless connection, the message went through but prompted an immediate message:  "Network intrusion detected.  The service has noticed unusual traffic coming from this computer.  Your connection to the internet will be slowed to 56K for the next ten minutes."  I am not making this up.  It was 1998 here in the Boulderado Hotel for the next little while.)

I was most struck by what Dale Hatfield had to say today.  He said he didn't see how we gave up on common carriage so easily.  It's a concept that goes back to the 1600s, and we dropped it in a matter of months.  He said that he didn't think that content and carriage should be mixed together, and that structural separation might not be such a bad idea. 

There was also a great moment when Judge Stephen Williams of the DC Circuit said that his perspective as a judge wasn't so useful.  (Of course, many cases reviewing what the FCC does go through Judge Williams's hands.)

Former Chairman Powell said that calling Google and Yahoo! new entrants and worrying about protecting them may not make sense.  He seeemed to be hinting that there were antitrust concerns looming for these companies.

Powell also talked about the institutional reality of the FCC.  Paraphrasing:  "The FCC is asked to make affirmative economic policy.  So it's like a little independent legislature.  A little Congress.  This means that it has the dynamics of a legislature.  So, like Congress, the political pressures are great. And the Senate confirmation process is aimed at getting politically reliable appointments to the Commission in place, who will advance particular points.  The Act bakes in this politicization by dividing the seats by party."

He went on:  "Also, the nature of material the FCC regulates is more intimate for regular people than what the FTC does or the SEC does.  So this invites enormous public reaction.  They're on the front page all the time." 

Comparing the FCC to the FTC, Powell noted that the FCC is "unique in its really narrow focus.  The FCC is 24/7  communications policy, all the time.  So naturally there's a professional lobby, and a series of incestuous relationships.  The first question about all of this should be: what should the FCC as an institution be in the future?  Its current construction isn't capable of certain things.  If we fail to ask that question, we're missing a really interesting and big piece of the story."  (Again -- all of this is paraphrasing.)

I was surprised at the references to the FTC.  It's true that it had seemed to me that the FTC was a good deal more professional and neutral than the FCC in the results it emerged with, but I didn't know that was a widely-held belief.  It must be demoralizing for the staff to work hard and then have political results-ended work dictate what emerges.  There seemed to be real questions as to whether the Commission would be able to do the backward-looking regulation that the PFF is calling for.  They're not great at enforcement.

As with all the telecom conferences (still not many) I've attended, I was once again taken aback by the cavalier attitude the telecom guys and the cable guys have towards the internet.  For them, it's a network like any other, and all the old rules should apply. 

Except when, as with common carriage, it's inconvenient to apply the old rules.

Chairman Powell spoke again after dinner tonight, urging the students to consider public service and reminding them that it wouldn't be easy.