Rumors began circulating late last year that the FCC was considering making line sharing part of their national broadband plan. Line sharing, as most of you know, involves requiring that incumbent carriers lease their networks to new entrants. The idea is that those ISPs then grow into larger carriers, capable of competition with incumbents. While we discarded the idea here (more accurately it was lobbied to death by major carriers and bungled by incompetent regulators), it has worked in markets like France, where consumers now see 100Mbps/50Mbps fiber service, VoIP and IPTV bundles for $40 a month.

Obviously carriers don’t like the idea because no giant incumbent carrier wants eroded revenues or added competition. Incumbent carriers spent literally hundreds of millions of dollars attacking the plan at every turn, and are in no hurry to have to fight this particular fight all over again. While rumors of a return to line sharing blossomed last fall, broadband plan boss Blair Levin (who was primarily responsible for line sharing in the 1996 Telecom Act) seemingly harpooned that idea in an interview with the Wall Street Journal last December:

“There are certain things where what s going on in other countries really isn’t germane for where we go from here. As to (line sharing rules), the courts threw that out and we re not that terribly interesting in moving toward things that will just freeze capital investment and have long, drawn-out court battles, he said. “That doesn’t strike me as that productive.”

In other words, Levin suggests that the FCC will avoid a return to line sharing because the agency will just wind up in the courts indefinitely fighting AT&T, Comcast and Verizon lawyers and their bottomless pocketbooks. But while Levin seemed to kill the idea, Business Week interviews an aide to FCC boss Julius Genachowski, who seems to think that line sharing remains very much on the table:

Letting competitors lease lines into businesses may boost Internet adoption, help small businesses grow and aid job creation, said Colin Crowell, an aide to Democratic FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, in an interview. “That is certainly something that we ll look very closely at, and has a lot of appeal as part of a national strategy,” said Crowell. The change may be proposed as part of the FCC s national plan for increasing the use of high-speed Internet, or broadband, that is to be delivered to Congress in March, Crowell said.

It still seems unlikely that the agency will take such a bold step, given that early glimpses of the plan by consumer advocates seems to indicate the plan doesn’t really do much of anything to seriously address competition. That of course would be a huge mistake, given that competition can cure all manner of problems in the sector (network neutrality, overly expensive metered broadband plans) without the need for additional, potentially dysfunctional regulation. We’ll see if line sharing is part of the equation with the FCC unveils their plan to Congress in 33 days.

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