Monday, May 12, 2008
How did AT&T engineer its open-access victory in San Francisco?
Jul 27, 1999 | It's nearing 6 o'clock on Monday evening and the audience in San Francisco's City Hall is getting restless. All the usual suspects are there -- the advocates for low-income housing, the lawyers' fraternal organizations, the local City Hall three-piece suiters. But there's also a big contingent of young programmers, paper cups of coffee in their hands, goatees in the latest style. They are the most fidgety. They look like they're not sure this can't all be done more easily via an exchange of e-mails.
The overflow crowd has turned out to see the debate on "open access." Open access in the current vernacular means forcing cable companies - in San Francisco's case, AT&T - to allow competing Internet service providers to offer high-speed Internet access over the cable firms' networks. In this instance, as everybody involved admits, the problem is largely theoretical, because the local cable system has not yet been upgraded to support cable modems and, as yet, nobody in San Francisco can get cable modems at all.
So why is the San Francisco Board of Supervisors taking up this issue now? Because AT&T has pretty much gotten itself into a regulatory pickle. After buying cable giant Tele-Communications Inc., AT&T has had to seek approval to transfer TCI's cable franchise rights to its name in each and every jurisdiction where TCI owns a cable system. And unfortunately for AT&T, some city governments aren't making it easy. Already Portland, Ore., and Miami have imposed an open-access requirement on AT&T as a condition of the transfer. That means for AT&T to offer cable at all, it will have to share its cable spectrum with Internet service providers and America Online. Of course, AT&T is fighting tooth and nail and has taken its case to court; it does not want to share the cable networks it has spent billions to acquire.
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Most of the hip young engineers in San Francisco's City Hall on Monday are actually employees of Excite@Home, the high-speed Internet service provider partly owned by AT&T. They have taken much of the day off, with the company's explicit blessing, to let their voice be heard and to cheer for the home team. The problem is that they came at around 3 o'clock to see a rip-roaring debate, and, well, it's just not shaping up that way. More than an hour is devoted to other issues before Tom Ammiano, president of the Board of Supervisors, introduces an amendment to the franchise legislation that would immediately require open access if the federal courts allow it in Portland or if AT&T voluntarily agrees to it anywhere. Then another supervisor introduces an amendment to the amendment. Or maybe it's a substitute amendment -- hardly anyone is quite sure which. And the only rip-roaring debate is about whether an amendment to the amendment is really permissible, and in case whether there should be an up or down vote on Supervisor Ammiano's amendment before a vote on the substitute amendment (or maybe the amended amendment).
The funny thing is that there's a much easier way of finding out what's going to happen than sitting around watching the politicians fumble for their papers. If you'd really been in a hurry to know the outcome, you could just as well have asked Blair Levin, a consultant to AT&T who had parachuted in from Washington, D.C. Levin is a bona fide veteran of the telecom regulation wars, having been the chief of staff to Reed Hundt when Hundt was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.
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