Interesting article from PC World:

Congress wants to reform telecommunications and cable rules, but each branch has its own approach and neither covers all the needed bases.

In short order, we’ll see practically no difference between much of what AT&T and Verizon offer and what Cablevision and Time Warner do. So it makes little sense to have one set of rules for the first two companies and another set for the other two–slowing down deployment of IPTV and other new services in the process. Acknowledging these facts, Congress wants to unravel the tangled web of existing laws, simplifying some, doing away with others, and in some cases creating national standards that would replace state and local laws. The new laws would apply to each of these companies more or less in the same way, based on their video service plans.

It’s an important and worthy goal. Reaching that goal won’t be easy, given the complexity of the issues and the sheer volume of regulations that currently exist. The House of Representatives took that into account when it crafted its targeted reform bill, the Communications, Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement Act of 2006 (H.R. 5252), which it passed in June (I discussed a slightly earlier version of this bill in my May column). The bill focuses primarily on the video franchise process, with minor attention to VoIP service, net neutrality issues, and cities or states that offer residents such services on their own.

The Senate took the House bill and completely revamped it in the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. What came out of that committee was three times as long as what went in, and the bill even had a new name, the Advanced Telecommunications and Opportunities Reform Act of 2006, or simply the Communications Act of 2006. It reworks the cable/video franchise process, addresses net neutrality, and goes on to cover the universal service fund, cell phone taxes, the digital TV transition, communications access for troops overseas, online child protection, and much more.