Over the past six years, under President Bush and a Republican House and Senate, the technology world has changed a million times over. Whether these changes were helped, hindered or allowed by the regulation, deregulation or lack of regulation by the Republican-dominated federal government is debatable, what's certain is that some things will change as the power shifts in the U.S. Congress.

Cynthia Brumfield over at IP Democracy has a great post about the probable new committee chairs, and the issues the Congress will probably look to tackle. Here are some of her predictions.

1. Telecom Reform Legislation is Dead: The whole concept of national video franchising is at an end. Pretty much anything in the Stevens bill (which, despite sponsor Ted Stevens' (R-AK) predictions doesn't stand a chance of passing in the upcoming lame-duck session) is off the table.
2. Net Neutrality Dominates the Discussion: It's weird and unfortunate that net neutrality became a partisan issue over the past two years, but it did, with Republicans fighting off any attempts to impose meaningful net neutrality requirements on cable operators and phone companies and Democrats, particularly Markey, fighting for tough regulations to bar broadband providers from favoring any content or application provider. While Markey and others will likely introduce net neutrality-type bills, most of the activity will likely be limited to jaw-boning the issue — lots of warnings and threats issued against any suspected bad activity by cable or phone companies, and so forth. The low likelihood of a net neutrality bill getting very far is reinforced by the tide of contributions from telcos and cable operators that flowed to Markey, Dingell and other Democrats as it became clear that Republicans would lose the House.
3. The FCC Will Become Even More Divided: Although the FCC is still Republican controlled, the stand-off over the AT&T-BellSouth merger vote is just one sign that the Commission will have a hard time issuing any but the most mundane decisions. Democratic Commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein are having a blast with their new-found Congressional backing (a sign of Copps' confidence is this op-ed piece in today's New York Times lambasting the FCC's policies) and Chairman Kevin Martin is probably toast. As McAvoy points out, the FCC's current campaign to relax or eliminate media ownership restrictions will probably get the kibosh from Dingell and Markey.
4. Hollywood's Intellectual Property Issues Get Even More Attention: Even under a Republican-controlled House, Hollywood fared pretty well. But now, Hollywood stands an even better chance of getting ahead with its agenda to crack-down on all the lifting, mixing, matching and mashing, not to mention piracy, occuring with video on the Internet. In line to become head of the House Judiciary Committee's Intellectual Property Subcomittee is Howard Berman (D-CA), whose district includes North Hollywood.

My impressions: Good riddance to the Stevens' Bill and I really hope the whole "Net Neutrality" debate fades into the background where it belongs. The market will take care of any tiered pricing schemes. — Brian Ward

Go to story from IP Democracy

Technorati tags: regulation.