DALLAS--The Federal Communications Commission has become a bureaucratic morass, incapable of enforcing the Telecommunications Act of 1996, three competitive industry veterans said yesterday.

And that was the nice stuff.

When XO Communications President and CEO Carl Grivner, McLeodUSA President and CEO Royce Holland and HyperCube President and CEO Ron Beaumont were asked what they would do as FCC chairmen, there was no mincing words.

“To say I am thoroughly disgusted is as nice as I can be,” Beaumont said. “I think the whole system is broken. We need a non-partisan FCC.”

Of particular concern to all three men are the pending forbearance petitions that would enable incumbents AT&T, Qwest and Verizon to stop selling some parts of their networks to competitors on the grounds that there is enough competition to protect consumers from price increases.

The CLEC industry is fighting hard against the FCC, and getting some support from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, but the three vets said the regulatory process itself is badly broken.

“What’s always lacking at the FCC is a dispute resolution process,” Holland said. “It’s a paper tiger. Carriers won’t pay their bills for interconnection, they won’t follow the rules. What is badly needed is a dispute resolution process that is based on arbitration, by industry experts, and not by the courts, where the judges who aren’t industry experts can be overwhelmed by lawyers. And then there needs to be strict enforcement, with fines and forfeiture.”

Increasingly, said Grivner, what happens at the FCC is totally behind closed doors. “It’s very behind-the-scenes until the very last minute,” he said.

A non-partisan FCC would be less likely to tilt heavily to one side’s favor, as the FCC does today with large incumbents, Beaumont said. “If you look back, post-divestiture, [the incumbent Bells] were afraid of the FCC,” he said. “Now they couldn’t care less. It’s too bureaucratic, too slow and non-reactive.”