THE FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS Commission on Thursday will again take up the question of whether it should mandate "open access" among cable carriers.

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Consumer groups active in the FCC's open-access efforts -- especially as those efforts come into play in the pending AOL-Time Warner merger -- blasted the FCC's latest overtures on the issue as too little, too late.

"This is again putting off what the commission should already have enacted," said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Media Education, in Washington.

Chester and other critics have long said that the FCC does not treat cable in the same way as DSL, where open access for competing ISPs is a rule.

FCC Chairman William Kennard in late June said the agency was embarking on formal proceedings on the issue of multiple ISPs being allowed access to the nation's cable platform.

Those proceedings were spurred by a decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which ruled in the AT&T v. City of Portland case that cable is a telecommunications service and should be treated as such.

On Thursday, the Commission will take up "Notice of Inquiry," which will solicit issues concerning technologies "to determine what legal and policy framework should apply" to cable, according to FCC documents.

But Chester said the new formality equates to more foot-dragging on the issue.

"The Notice of Inquiry will take several months and further postpones a cable network competition policy, " Chester said.

The timing on any new policy is related but separate from the AOL-Time Warner deal, which will likely bear open-access mandates handed down from both the FCC and the Federal Trade Commission, according to Chester.

"In AOL-Time Warner, we hope that the FTC would require open access and the FCC would support that. But that would simply apply to AOL-Time Warner, which would own 20 percent of the cable infrastructure. We still need the FCC to act to ensure that the rest is open as well," Chester said.