Top Verizon policy executive Tom Tauke pushed for an overhaul of telecommunications regulation in a speech given at a conference of conservative lawyers in Washington, D.C.
In a Saturday panel appearance at the Federalist Society’s National Conference, Tauke said current regulations were outdated and needed to be updated to reflect new advances in technology.
“The grinding you hear are the gears churning as policymakers try to fit fast-changing technologies and competitive markets into regulatory boxes built for analog technologies and monopoly markets,” he said.
He argued that new policies should be guided by a federal framework with four key components: case-by-case adjudication instead of anticipatory rulemaking; government intervention only to prevent harm to consumers or anti-competitive activity; revamping universal access subsidy programs; and a single federal agency with clear jurisdiction over telecommunications regulations.
Tauke also took aim at the FCC’s net neutrality efforts, which he characterized as “limited to how Internet service providers might degrade or block Internet traffic, and not on other sectors of the Internet marketplace where similar consumer harm could take place.”