Not my own prom, but not far from it

OK, so it didn’t involve limos, corsages, and crepe paper, but thirty years after my last prom, last week I went to another one.

At least that’s what Kevin Krupky, legislative counsel for Alcatel-Lucent and my date for the evening, called it. What it really was, was the annual dinner hosted by the FCBA for the chairman of the FCC. Just Kevin, me, a head table stacked with FCC commissioners and former chairmen, and about 1500 D.C.-based telecom lawyers and lobbyists.

What a scene — as full of potential for sociological dissection as any real prom. Given the outgoing status of FCC chair Kevin Martin, the table-hopping was less pronounced around him and more noticeable among the big K Street lobbying firms. In the frantic card exchanges, you could see signs of the game of musical chairs now underway with the likely shift of direction in U.S. telecommunications policy.

Martin’s after-dinner remarks had the anticipated roast feel; he claimed sponsorship of the ‘No Lawyer Left Behind’ Act due to his salvos at the cable industry’s bundling practices, and bemoaned the worsening economics in the sector, suggesting that “Comcast couldn’t even afford to hire seatwarmers to not laugh at my jokes.”

Underneath the jocularity, worries bubbled up at every table. “It took an economic meltdown and an election to do it, but in a few short weeks, ‘regulation’ has gone from a bad word to a good word,” rued one lobbyist. Another observed the reduction in the number of tables hosted by troubled firms like Motorola and Sprint Nextel. But the big worry, which I heard all evening as well as in meetings earlier that day at the USTA: Will the new administration’s support for expanding broadband access be twinned with ‘net neutral’ regulation?

Fair question. If that worry is realized, it will punish every network operator that has depended on lobbying to solve that threat rather than service differentiation. The answer that will skirt this trap while paying bigger financial dividends than lobbying bills is investing in the tools to create tiered connectivity services to consumers.

I enjoyed the dinner, though, even if I didn’t stay long enough to see who the prom King and Queen were.