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To: KJ. Moy who wrote (9322)	5/9/1999 1:53:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Respond to of 29970

>>How can congress even attempt to try regulating it. The lawmakers have no business in this matter. FCC may oversee this. That's it.<< You raise a good point. Congress and the FCC must defer to consultants, commissions, hearings, and to the fed's engineering guys for market intelligence, which includes an understanding of the core nature and being of the beasts they are contemplating meddling in. That's a neat trick, when the architects who are building the widgets haven't even declared that they have a finished product yet. And they wont, going forward, since everything will continuously and rapidly evolve in a mode marked by upgrades and extensibility. Previously, regulation and the requisite need to understand the implications of a technology (which meant also the lag in consenting to permit those services) would lag the introduction of a finished product by some number of months or years. During those earlier interim periods of "review," carriers merely waited for approvals, and rebutted objections, but they finally got their way, and no big deal. The coin machines and toll message meters continued to ring up quarters, dimes and nickels, just the same, and glacial shifts took their turn, eventually, when the time was right. That was then. Today, the feds haven't a clue what some garage mechanic or college freshman will come out with during the next week or month, or which of umpteen already-competing standards (each with a different corresponding regulatory implication) will unfold and gain acceptance by the market place. Never mind being able to predict, they can't even fathom what is being deployed at the present time, with virtual boundaries replacing the physically defined ones, and contraptus sui generis taking rule of the day. Those guys and gals in Washington and the state PUCs are a hurting bunch right now. In the VoIP sector, the FCC took an unusual and bold position recently, IMO, stating that they haven't a clue where the whole thing might wind up, therefore they stated that they would be deferring any decisions at the present time. Of course, there was a little bit of gambitting taking place there, with foreign PTTs in the face of World Trade negotiations, but they nevertheless hit the nail on the head with their plea of ignorance concerning the nature of the technology as it relates to existing regulatory frame works. They were correct in taking that position, for another reason, as well: The players in evolving techs, themselves, seem to be hell-bent on obsolescing their own wares with astounding and unprecedented regularity. Anything that the FCC could post as a notice of proposed rule making in this context would very soon be anachronized, even before the GAO could approve the printing contract to get it bound and published. Toffler was right, it appears. The third tidal wave has struck, and the life guards are getting washed up in the undercurrents. It is against this backdrop that I've painted, that you can expect the next regularoty decisions to be reached in this sphere.