A MODEST PROPOSAL

Any technology worth its salt has its own forum or consortia. There's the DSL Forum, the Fiber to the Home Council, the WiMAX Forum, to name a few. These organizations exist to educate, to advance interoperability and thus facilitate deployment and, in many cases, to develop the standards and requirements so essential to mass-market adoption. The ones that succeed are those that do the best job of tackling real-world deployment issues without getting bogged down by members' self-serving interests. The U.S. telecom industry needs a forum that can apply this cooperative technique to create the new regulatory framework so badly needed. In one of his final appearances as FCC chairman, Michael Powell challenged the VON audience to help regulators do a better job of coming forward with compromises instead of simply presenting “impossible binary choices” in which one side wins all. Such an organization's success would depend on all parties being willing to honestly negotiate and seek common ground on thorny matters such as intercarrier compensation and the future of universal service. But the solutions it could develop would likely be better than those imposed by regulators.