F.C.C. Plans to Overhaul Telecom Fund to Focus on Expanding Broadband

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday outlined a plan to transform the Universal Service Fund, an $8 billion fund that is paid for by the nation’s telephone customers and used to subsidize basic telephone service in rural areas, into one that will help expand broadband Internet service to 18 million Americans who lack high-speed access.

The chairman, Julius Genachowski, said the overhaul of the fund would eliminate waste and inefficiencies in a program that is outdated, unfair and not accountable to the consumers who support it through monthly assessments on their phone bills.

An F.C.C. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid overshadowing the chairman’s address, said the amount that consumers paid each month to finance universal service was unlikely to fall and could increase. Phone companies are assessed a percentage of their revenue from interstate and international service, and most pass along those charges to customers. The contribution rate has more than doubled over the last decade, to 15 percent currently, up from 7 percent in 2001.

“Broadband has gone from being a luxury to being a necessity for full participation in our economy and society,” Mr. Genachowski said in a speech Thursday at the agency’s headquarters. “This plan will bring enormous benefits to individual consumers, our national economy and our global competitiveness.”

The plan would provide for broadband in hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses beginning next year, Mr. Genachowski said, and would cut by half the number of Americans without broadband access by 2017. “And it will put us on the path to universal broadband service by the end of the decade,” he added.

This is the long-range plan. Internet access is now a "civil right" and with that, the future will transform into government-approved content only.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_service

Universal service is an economic, legal and business term used mostly in regulated industries, referring to the practice of providing a baseline level of services to every resident of a country.

The concept of universal service appears to have originated with Rowland Hill and the Uniform Penny Post which he introduced in the United Kingdom in 1837. Though Hill never used the term "universal service", his postal system had the hallmarks of early universal service; postal rates were reduced to uniform rates throughout the nation which were affordable to most Britons, enabled by the postage stamp (first introduced here) and a General Post Office monopoly on mail. Hill's reforms were quickly adopted by postal authorities worldwide, including the United States Post Office Department (now the United States Postal Service) which already held a monopoly through the Private Express Statutes. The service obligations of USPS under current law are commonly referred to as the "universal service obligation" or "USO". Universal service is also a key objective of the Universal Postal Union.[2]

The term "universal service", on the other hand, appears to have originated with Theodore Newton Vail, president of American Telephone & Telegraph (the original AT&T) and head of the Bell System, in 1907 with the corporate slogan "One Policy, One System, Universal Service".[3][4][5] It was intended as a contrast to the "dual service" that had become common since the original Bell telephone patents expired in 1894, where independent telephone companies operated not only in non-Bell System markets, but also as a competitor in Bell markets.[6]

Translation: This overhaul is designed to create new waste and inefficiencies in a program that will still be unfair and not accountable to the consumers who support it through monthly assessments on their phone bills, but at least this program will give the government more control over who benefits from the government-imposed theft and redistribution.

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