Lauren Pete Belvin, VP of federal policy and law, Qwest Communications

Broadband holds the ultimate promise of eliminating the artifacts we inherited from the industrial age — such as socio-economic differences and geographic isolation — that tend to divide people. But before that promise can be realized, obstacles must be overcome.

The largest is the grafting of thinking that is grounded in a voice telephone age to the deployment of very different, very new broadband networks and technology. These regulatory carryovers distort the market because they limit the ability of certain companies to access capital, which keeps them out of the market. That, in turn, limits competition, restricts network availability and consumer choice, and keeps prices artificially high.

The FCC sees high-speed broadband as being successful because it's available in a lot of places that are passed by cable. Ipso facto, there's no problem because somebody out there is providing it. And if we just sit back for a few years, then maybe satellite and 3G wireless — if they ever get past the spectrum problems — also will provide it. But all of that is blind to the question of why the FCC isn't doing something about the impediments that are keeping telephone companies from providing it.

The regulatory calculus needs to be changed. We have said loudly for as long as anyone would listen that the way to go is to make everybody as deregulated as possible. The issue the FCC fundamentally has to come to grips with is whether it is going to trust the initiatives that seem to be at work in the cable market.

If the commission removes the restrictions that hinder the telephone companies and lets them exercise their own prerogatives and their own marketplace judgment, will this problem solve itself, absent heavy-handed regulation? I would say yes, it would. Consequently, the government needs to even out the regulatory score by eliminating regulation that doesn't have to be there.

Those observers who say that taking the shackles off the Bell companies will result in the demise of all competitive carriage are spitting into the wind. The very fact that CLECs — including a number of facilities-based CLECs — are surviving in today's thoroughly rotten economic climate is proof they're going to continue to survive. They've got the wherewithal, they're nimble and they have a plan. And that's all anybody has to have to succeed.—As told to Glenn Bischoff