States Seeking Better Broadband Nationwide Turn and Make a Local Focus

State telecommunications officials concerned about the universal deployment and use of high-speed Internet services joined together at a San Jose conference on Thursday to compare notes, plot strategy and encourage programs and activities that will lead to better broadband nationwide. The states represented at the conference, the broadband summit of the Federal Communications Commission and the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, were from Alaska, California, Iowa, Indiana, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Tennessee. The FCC-NARUC joint summit meeting was the first in three years - or the first since the last sputtering of the legal battles precipitated by the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Those fights concerned whether state regulators should have a say in setting competition rules for telephone services. By the end of 2004, federal courts had sided with Bell companies in urging federal regulation of telecommunications, cutting state regulators out of interstate communications. Internet services have generally also fallen in that category, often hamstringing the efforts of state regulators to act on broadband access within their states.