A message from the ether, guest poster Melissa Davis tells how she sees the conditions that underlie and surround some of the topics we've been discussing upstream. This is further to our uplinked discussions (begin: msg# 7418) concerning taxes, the Universal Service Fund and VoIP issues, and then some. Melissa was kind enough to respond to my request for comments on those earlier posts. Some forum members you may recognize her name from her days at several top-tier telecom vendor and consulting organizations. This is what she had to say:
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Frank (20 June 2004)
1. I really think you have hit the points squarely.
2. Melissa’s hearing of the recent FCC hearings on VoIP and the States.
3. Melissa’s take on the broader government issues.
4. THAT SAID: Where melissa thinks we are.
I really think you have hit the points squarely.
I borrow so many models from physics, where minds have to stretch to model and make metaphors out of so many things that are counter-intuitive, where Nature simply doesn’t behave as the built-in primate neural structures of our cortices try to structure it.
You have trumped most analysts, however, by moving well beyond the point particles, where all taxes are like all quantum electro-magnetic point particles: all taxes are alike, just like all photons, neutrons, electrons, quarks, etc. are alike. There are just families of point particles, grouped by mass, charge, and spin, and there is nothing more to be said. Taxes are the same. Here I cite your statements that show you are working with the wave and all its entanglement characteristics:
>and once again appear to be perpetuating a system of values and assumptions from
>another era gone by, another anachronism that has been in the making since the notion
>of broadband in support of VoIP was first conceived.
>See how the game evolves? A tax is first called a charge, and then a subsidy is called a
>fund.
It matters not at all the original reasons for the taxes or in the case of the Federal tax, when they were long ago set to expire.
Melissa’s hearing of the recent FCC hearings on VoIP and the States:
As I listened to the arguments made by the several states at the FCC hearings broadcast by C-SPAN, the States were not upset over telecom innovation, specifically VoIP, they were upset at the loss of revenue. Their complaints were that, having indexed their State income taxes to the Federal Income Tax, they had sustained already enormous shortfalls of revenue as the result of the Bush Tax Cuts.
The States were objecting to the loss of revenue they forecast they would sustain from taxes on legacy circuit switched telephony if VoIP weren’t taxed. They weren’t asking IF consumers would switch, it was assumed that the SPs would switch because VoIP was far less expensive and more efficient, and the tax avoidance would simply be another incentive.
They only mentioned 911, lifeline, and universal service as banner-headers. It was clear that the real issues were loss of revenue. The “reduction-ad-absurdum” was given by Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN), the first Republican governor of TN since Re-Destruction, formerly a clean-it-up, common-sense Howard Baker/Everett Dirkson legacy centrist, then President of the University of Tennessee system (albeit self-appointed and forced to resign in a financial mis-management scandal), a free-enterprise entrepreneur (T.G.I. Fridays being one of his ventures (with others)), who claimed that keeping the Internet and VoIP free from taxation was an “unfunded mandate” placed on the States. (Odd, since the States were not required to DO anything at all, and further, that the adoption of the new technology was clearly an “at-risk” private sector initiative).
So here is my take: U Dunn GUD ;-)
Melissa’s take on the broader government issues:
As long as folk hold to the naïve belief that the Government at any level is some Immaculate Conception and Incarnation of Adam Smith’s “Free Hand”, the body politik not only is susceptible to manipulations by the politically powerful vested interests, but actually elicits such manipulation.
This is a Hamiltonian economy (I highly recommend Ron Chernow’s current NY Times Best Seller biography, Hamilton.) The Government is simply a Player in the Marketplace, albeit a huge and crude one with the coercive power of guns and courts.
It takes more than fifth grade American history knowledge, but less than a doctoral dissertation on The Federalist Papers to grasp that the Founding Fathers set up the Federal Government to be paralyzed among competing interests, to be able to do little until consensus emerged. But the Founding Fathers had no prescience about the huge numbers of and powers of executive agencies or cowardly Congresses controlled by special interest lobbyists.
When the Congress can develop consensus on what needs be done, it does it. Else, Congress passes ambiguity, leaving it to the Executive Agencies to develop regulations. Those Agencies are clueless, and are set up such that career progression is heavily correlated with risk-avoidance. In the presence of ambiguous legislation, lobbyists slip a CD with the regulations of some interest group favored by the political appointees of the Office of the President/OMB will allow or support. The Agency people spend their lives producing one massive, preferably multi-volume, three-ring binder of policy assertions, primarily done by Beltway Bandits on a “charge by the word and by the pound” basis. These are equally long and therefore inherently inconsistent, written by people with a “policy-bias” with little clue about how anything really works and zero experience at meeting a payroll. The business model of the Beltway Bandit Policy Wonks is: “pay us to write long obfuscating complicated tortured syntax which hides the inconsistency no one has the attention span to detect for some time well after payment for the task is made; then pay us to interpret it, then pay us to defend you for having adopted it.”
So a huge part of the game with Government is keeping everything in play. None of the “K” and “L” street law firms or the lobbyists every want anything conclusively decided because of the revenue hit that would result. No incumbent special interest on the ‘dole” wants any conclusive decision, because they are in a far better position, virtue of incumbency, to starve out the competition, thus exercising their fiduciary obligations to their stockholders and investors. The Beltway Bandit Policy wonks allow all that to exist.
So you are massively on point (oe ‘surfing the wave’) to call it a “game.” And it is a Game Theory game, well worked out, where all equilibria are merely transitory.
THAT SAID: Where melissa thinks we are
Clueless:
- the FCC, divided, clueless, having had the Courts overturn a great number of their decisions
- the Congress: they will seek to avoid anything they can.
They love the Internet without knowing what it is or what people and Enterprises are really doing with it. They know the BUST and do not want to do anything to worsen that. Many have huge numbers of unemployed telecom workers who have long ago run out of benefits and are working at CompUSA, Home Depot, IKEA, etc., if at all. They do not want to stand in the way of progress. The ILECs have money, but the vendors are throwing money also
- the IXC’s: broke and looking for solutions, do not want any constraints on their options
- the deep fiber vendors, see above
- the ILECs: clueless. They want to win, preserve their bases, but do not know how, lack a business model just as much as the rest of us
- the emerging VoIP voices: we can solve the problems of 011, Life-Line, Universal Service, “just give us more time.”
- the cellular voices: we don’t have a model either but RF will be ubiquitous. We need more time to get to G3 with QoS and integrate. We will be the bridge.
Forecast: delay, nothing will happen on the taxing of VoIP anytime in the next 36 months.
My take and thanks for giving me the opportunity.
melissa
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Any comments or corrections concerning the above views expressed by Melissa are welcome.
FAC
frank@fttx.org |
