As a long-time telecommunications researcher who used data that carriers had historically provided to commission, the site is much more conducive to locating information through keyword search or by clicking on tabs and links. As a person who used to have to find relevant rulemaking citations among dozens of three-ring-binders of aggregated proceedings from “Pike & Fisher,” openness is unprecedented.

But where it really sets itself apart is with the “Take Action” bar, which provides quick links to parts of the site that enable concerned citizens to “Comment,” “Complain,” “Discuss,” or simply get “Help” from the right resources within the Commission. I find the blog-like nature of the site to be very engaging. The content seems fresh, dynamic and topical. The call-to-action is pervasive. It will be interesting to see whether the general public takes advantage of these improvements and takes a more active in regulatory processes.

It was a move that, among other objectives, aimed to please FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, who is also quoted in TWICE, commending “Apple’s decision to open its platform to 3G calling, an action that will create new opportunities for entrepreneurs and provide more choices for consumers.” The immediate beneficiary is Connecticut-based iCall, which has added “free phone calls” from the iPhone to a roster of free or low-cost voice calls using PCs running specified versions of Windows, Linux or MacOS.

According to reports Fring has already joined iCall in the AppStore, while Skype says its app is ready but waiting for a few tests and modifications to be complete. The move dramatizes the opportunities presented by iPhone while, at the same time showcasing how opportunities can be created or destroyed at the whim of Apple’s policymakers. At this point, just a few days after Google launched its Web-based access to Google Voice features, there is no turning back, and charging forward means that new features and functions are bound to augment vanilla, free long-distance.

To maintain its leadership the company is engaged in a number of initiatives that can only be called transformative. While it has always been a master of manipulating public policy, its lobbyists have gone the extra mile (or perhaps the “last mile”) in the past week by filing these comments proposing that the FCC develop guidelines for killing off POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) and shutting down the copper-based PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network).

On the surface, the proposal has a certain amount of internal logic. As AT&T’s lawyers explain, it is losing residential customers at an accelerating rate and, as a result, it has to raise the rates it charges remaining residential customers in order to maintain acceptable profitability. Only a monopoly sees the necessity to raise prices in the face of declining demand; and it is very easy to interpret AT&T’s pricing policy as an effort to accelerate the demise of the PSTN. Citing the FCC’s “successes” in coordinating broadcast TV’s transition to digital signals and in helping mobile carriers move from the first generation AMPS (Advanced Mobile Phone Service) to PCS and then digital PCS, it is asking for the Commission to oversee the process of establishing a date-certain for abandoning the existing phone network so that it can dedicate its resources exclusively to extending broadband links to the Internet to 100% of the nation.

As Bruce Kushnick of New Networks Institute points out here, this is a false choice and a spurious argument. There are not “two networks”, there is only one utility and, over the years AT&T and its cohort of common carriers (primarily Verizon) has been compensated for operating its networks at rates that took into account improvements and upgrades – including special funds to extend broadband to every home and business in America.

In a particular telling section of TeleTruth’s memorandum, Kushnick provides the following “reality check:

AT&T, right now has 1.7 million total U-Verse, broadband-TV capable households (AT&T 3rd/q2009). That’s it! They claimed they would have 18 million by 2007 (not counting BellSouth). AT&T now controls 22 states. If AT&T is going to walk away from the utility networks and we leave it up to AT&T to build out their ‘broadband networks’ —one-half of the US is going to be harmed.

So that’s where we’re at in Washington, DC. Policy makers have declared that it is in the national interest to extend broadband access to all the homes in the U.S. Only AT&T has proposed that the best way to do it is to walk away from its existing physical plant in favor of a yet-to-be-constructed resource. In its filing it invites interested parties to comment on the approach. I urge everyone to take an interest.

I called this “Part 1″ of our discussion of AT&T in the Age of Ma Google because managing regulators is only part of AT&T’s initiatives in this age of Ma Google and Recombinant Communication. Later today I’ll be issuing an advisory on the many initiatives launched by AT&T at CES, including support of multiple mobile operating systems, developer environments and application distribution platforms announced at the AT&T Developer Summit. It is there that AT&T showed its capacity to support Recombinant Communications development efforts.