At last week’s Networked Economy conference held in Paris, an exchange between Bruno Lasserre, Director General of Posts & Telecommunications in France, and Reed Hundt, newly appointed chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission, showed France to be more ready than the US to eliminate its foreign ownership rules relating to the telecommunications industry. We’re ready to sign a reciprocal agreement with the US to lift our foreign ownership limitations, but only if the other does, Lasserre said. The problem in the US is that the foreign ownership limit is written into the [communications regulatory] law. The government should get Congressional approval to lift it. After Lasserre’s remark, panel moderator Denis Gilhooly, publishing director for CommunicationsWeek International, which sponsored the conference, asked Hundt whether, in fact, the US’s foreign ownership limitations were somewhat outdated. That may be the view of certain companies in the US who would like to have foreign ownership, but I don’t think it’s a widespread view in the US, and it’s certainly not a priority for many Congressmen, Hundt replied. It doesn’t mean that we’re not interested in talking about it, since it is in line with the ‘regulatory symmetry’ that was talked about earlier; so if other countries were eliminating their foreign ownership limitations, we would have to look at it. I’m just not sure the ideal method of pursuing it would be in the Congress right now, he said.
