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Technology Stocks : AT&T -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (2758)	8/13/1999 6:38:00 PM
From: American Spirit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4298

Great news on ATT and ATHM: WASHINGTON, Aug 13 (Reuters) - AT&T Corp. <T.N> and the rest of the cable industry will likely get a boost from the Federal Communications Commission next week in their legal battle to avoid local regulation of new high-speed cable Internet services. The agency plans to file an amicus, or "friend of the court," brief on Monday siding with AT&T in the No. 2 cable firm's effort to overturn a Portland, Oregon rule allowing competing Internet service providers access to its system. A Portland federal district in May upheld the city's right to impose so-called open access requirements on AT&T, sparking other cities to consider similar regulations and knocking down share prices of cable company stocks. The FCC has twice decided to monitor -- but not to regulate -- the nascent cable Internet market and the agency's brief could sway an appeals court to overturn the earlier ruling. Communications attorneys said the brief will argue that, as a matter of national policy, regulation of cable Internet service in its current early stages would do more harm than good. But the brief cannot back some of the more substantive arguments made by AT&T over which laws should apply because the commission itself has never addressed those questions, they said. "An amicus brief is a limited forum for the commission," said one Washington attorney who declined to be identified. "I expect you will see a repetition of what they've said before, that it's too soon to take any action." Cable companies will likely be satisfied by the arguments, but local governments that see the agency's purposeful inaction as having left a vacuum could be further upset. "It's not going to help the situation and it's potentially hurting it," said Kenneth Fellman, chairman of the FCC's Local and State Government Advisory Committee. "I find it a bit disconcerting and a little unusual that the commission, never having opened a docket on this issue, would interfere in somebody else's dispute." The committee last month asked the FCC to open a formal inquiry into new high-speed Internet services. FCC chairman William Kennard turned down the request in a letter earlier this week, noting that such an inquiry would cause uncertainty that would slow the roll-out of high-speed services. Currently, only about one million people subscribe to cable Internet services, which operate up to 50 times faster than the ordinary telephone Internet connections still used by about 40 million people. Analysts predict high-speed access from cable and telephone companies will catch on rapidly with consumers over the next few years, making regulation of the new services a critical battleground for the future of the Internet. Unlike subscribers accessing the Internet at high or low speeds using telephone lines, cable Internet subscribers must use an Internet service provider owned by the cable companies, like ExciteAtHome Corp.<ATHM.O> In Portland, competing ISPs objected and the city and neighboring county of Multnomah declared that AT&T must allow customers to choose their own ISP. Regulators in Broward County, Florida, followed in July leading to a second AT&T lawsuit that has not yet been decided. AT&T appealed its Portland district court loss to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, fearing that if the lower court ruling stood, many more cities would consider imposing open access as they assessed AT&T's $58 billion acquisition of MediaOne Group Inc.<UMG.N> A spokeswoman for AT&T said the company had not seen the FCC's brief and could not comment on it. "We agree with Chairman Kennard that the information superhighway won't work if 30,000 municipalities each have their own Internet access regulations," the spokeswoman said. "These regulations aren't needed anyway. They would only slow the deployment of new high-speed Internet services and the development of local phone competition." 17:43 08-13-99