FCC Chairman Genachowski has set a vote tomorrow for a Notice of Proposed Rule Making on Universal Service Fund and Intercarrier Compensation reform.
Some of the ideas Mr. G sketched out in a speech today, in which he called the ICC System “flawed” and “unstable” and the USF “plagued with inefficiencies”, had already been outlined in the FCC’s National Broadband Plan.
The most striking proposal in the speech, delivered at The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, was a plan to “phase down intercarrier payments.”
As I’ve written about before (see the “Shoot the Laywers” post), the ICC rewards local carriers, mostly rural, with high per minute payments for calls terminated on their switches. These access fees are split with services that have set up intimate talk —read porn—conference bridges in what is referred to as “traffic pumping.”