William Kennard won confirmation to head the Federal Communications Commission, but not without pointed reminders of congressional dissatisfaction with the way the agency is implementing the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
The vote was 99-1. Senator Conrad Burns, a Montana Republican who has complained loudly about how the agency's orders are affecting rural states, was the dissenter.
Until dissuaded by Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Mississippi), Burns had threatened to postpone a vote on Kennard, the FCC's general counsel, and three other commission nominees. The special target of his wrath: the agency's orders so far on universal service - a six-decades-old regime of subsidies that attempts to ensure that all consumers can get affordable phone service. Universal service is particularly important to rural and other low-profit markets.
The 1996 law, in line with its across-the-board intent to spark telecom competition, called for revisions in the universal-service program to get new companies to sell products to the target markets. The FCC has delayed setting subsidy formulas, and the ideas it has put forward have struck Burns and fellow rural-state legislators as expensive and tending to limit the range of services available to their constituents.
"Ensuring that these people have access to affordable, quality telephone service ... is important to all of us," Burns said in the debate before today's vote. "We do not want to see that dismantled."
Burns also expressed displeasure that the one area in which the FCC has moved aggressively to define universal service is to extend it to include wiring schools, libraries, and other public facilities to the Internet. The US$2.8 billion needed for that project will drain resources needed to serve rural residents and small businesses that rely on the universal-service program.
"By focusing on the expansion of the definition of universal service to include broad-ranging social programs, the FCC's progress for maintaining universal service has been delayed," Burns said. "While such goals as providing Internet access to schools and libraries may be laudable, they were never meant to be part of universal service."
To be sure, Kennard faced complaints about wider issues related to the Telecom Act. Members of Congress have been venting for months about the slow pace of making so the law's dictates of competition in local and long-distance phone markets and in the cable-television industry. Many in the industry have complained that the FCC orders implementing the act are overly burdensome. The agency has been fighting a losing legal battle with big telcos, most notably SBC Communications, over its regulations.
Before the vote, Senator John McCain (R-Arizona), chairman of the Commerce, Transportation, and Science Committee that oversees the agency, spoke of the act as "an abject failure" in delivering the expected benefits to consumers, and he said he wanted Kennard to "understand the dissatisfaction with what is occurring, and [asked] that he be responsive and flexible in addressing our concerns."
"It would be nice to say that all this is working well," McCain said. "But the truth is that it isn't. The lower rates, better service, and increased competition called for by the Act have translated, at least in the short run, into higher rates, increased concentration among big industry players, and reams of new regulations."
Kennard's confirmation was preceded by voice-vote approval Tuesday night of three other commission nominees - Michael Powell, chief of staff at the Justice Department's antitrust division; Harold Furchtgott-Roth, an economist with the House Commerce Committee; and Gloria Tristani, a New Mexico state utilities regulator.
