Globalcomm: FCC chair, Orange CEO close out day 1

Chicago—Delivering two very different speeches, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and Orange CEO Sanjiv Ahuja closed out the first day of Globalcomm Monday, the former reiterating his positions on regulatory issues such as Net neutrality and cable franchising and the latter promoting the rise of mobile entertainment.

Martin lauded the commission’s own efforts in keeping prices for consumers down, citing such decisions as access line deregulation, which have led to lowered prices for home broadband despite the fact that most CLECs were removed from the equation. However, he said more deregulation needed to be done in the cable space, as the franchising rules that give cable companies practical monopolies in their service markets have led to ever-increasing price hikes.

“In every other area the commission regulates, we’ve seen prices go down,” Martin said. Broadband access, wireless voice minutes and long-distance have all gotten cheaper, but cable bills have jumped up as much as 80% in the last few years, he said. “Having additional competitors in the that area is critical.”

On Net neutrality, Martin defended the carriers promoting tiered or prioritized broadband access. Although Martin said the FCC would crack down on any attempts to block users from content based on what they paid for service, he also said that users who pay for slower or non-prioritized access may find themselves inadvertently barred from accessing high-bandwidth content because of their connection speeds.

Speaking after Martin, Ahuja spoke of Orange’s own pan-European mobile content efforts and cited TV, video-on-demand and music as three of the key entertainment drivers over the mobile network. But he said that one of the most critical elements of the content puzzle will be user self-generated content. One in four Internet users create their own content for the Web today, which can easily be extrapolated to the mobile Web. Furthermore, self-produced content creates demand for itself: As users post more content, the more people will read it, generating traffic for carriers, and the more readers a user gets, the more likely he or she is post more content, generating yet more traffic.

“Once they realize they have an audience, they have even more incentive to return again,” Ahuja said.