The ACTA petition sought two principal actions from the FCC:
The professed rationale for ACTA's request was to preserve a so-called "level playing field" between traditional long-distance telephone companies and the Internet. In reality, the motivation behind this petition was to protect a regulatory anomaly allowing arbitrage -- technically known as "resale" -- from assault by a new, technologically advanced form of competition. Revealingly, ACTA did not ask that the FCC deregulate circuit-switched telephony in response to the advent of Internet telephony, but rather that it regulate the latter.
There are nonetheless a number of interesting questions raised by the ACTA petition. These include how to treat software manufacturers who provide the applications enabling Internet-based telecom functionalities; how to identify "voice" packets among the millions of Internet communications transported daily; and whether measurement of Internet voice and video transmissions (something not done today) would be feasible without imposing such massive overhead requirements that the Internet itself collapsed of its own weight.
One of the biggest questions, again revealing the differences between the Internet and the PSTN, is who is the "carrier" of an Internet phone call? Unlike the PSTN, there is no single long-distance carrier responsible for a user's Internet communications; ISPs merely transport TCP/IP packets between their POPs and the "next router up the line." (See the accompanying Internet architecture diagram.) Thus, the common carrier model applicable to traditional telecom providers is does not fit the decentralized, open-standards model of the Internet.
The specific relief requested by ACTA appears doomed -- there is little sentiment at the FCC for imposing Title II (common carrier) regulation on the Internet. The larger questions flowing from the ACTA petition, however, present a real risk of governmental regulation. These three issues -- universal service, access charges and Internet governance -- are the focus of the balance of this presentation.
