No Soup for You
Approximately 15% of the rural telecom industry has been told by the FCC that their operations are just not efficient enough. In some cases, individual expenses are the object of the FCC’s attention, in others the past investment has been identified as excessive. Kinda reminds me of the Seinfeld show’s Soup Nazi “No soup for you” policy. Regardless, what makes me, at minimum shake my head in wonder, or in the alternative, scream bloody murder is this: the new USF policy is NOT how FCC policy treated multi-billion dollar multinational telcos a generation ago.
When the FCC converted the former Bell companies to price caps, it first justified its new policy by accusing the carriers of waste, fraud and abuse on a mammoth scale. Sound familiar? Studies citing their bloated operations and their un-pure motives under rate-of-return formed the basis for imposing a price cap policy. And yet…and yet…when it came down to implementing the new regulatory regime, the FCC did not disallow any of the alleged wasteful, fraudulent or abusive results of the past. No, the FCC told these gargantuan goliaths….go forth and sin no more. Your current revenue streams are not that offensive. Only in the future will our policy force an adjustment to prices. Take some time, adjust your costs, anything else would be unfair.
And now the current FCC tells 15% of the rural telcos, some serving Hell’s half acre, that they spent too much or even worse invested too much and they will not get cost recovery starting….NOW?!
We need to at least scream this message from the mountaintops. We should (and have) recognized the need for regulatory change. But our past decisions were made in good faith. A policy that suggests past actions can be harshly punished rather than a new set of guidelines and incentives for future behavior is blatantly unfair. So my close is for the lawyers…please find a legal definition of unfair, and then use it.