The bill is anchored in a common-sense notion: If we increase competition in the exploding area of communications we can encourage both low rates for consumers and creative new approaches to these businesses. In its most dramatic flourish, the bill releases a slew of 800-pound gorillas from the various cages in which they were impounded. Until now huge segments of the telecom world labored under close restrictions, in effect creating protected marketplaces. Take cable television. Only one company can afford to wire an area for cable; from then on it holds a virtual monopoly. If your local cable company chose to fill its limited channel space with zillions of pay-per-view showings of Steven Seagal films instead of the History Channel, tough luck. The telecom bill encourages the owners of the other wire into your home – the phone line-to top the offerings of the cable guys as well as the broadcasters by shooting video services into your set. Also, these regional-phone-service providers, the “Baby Bells,” can for the first time move into the long-distance business. For their part, the AT & Ts and Sprints can begin selling local phone service. And don’t worry about your cable provider – it is now permitted to offer phone service. (Now you can use the cable to call the provider and be placed on hold.)
Sounds marry, an invitation to what the House’s resident telecom guru Ed Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, calls “a fiber-optic free-for-all” where prices plummet, services abound and the consumer is awash in cool media at low prices. But don’t expect Tiffany TV at Wal-Mart prices right away – the bill removes price constraints on cable, and rates expected to rise, at least in the short term. The bill also lifts restrictions against certain kinds of huge media mergers and alliances, some of which could dampen that all-important competition. For instance, no longer is a company forbidden to hold a cable franchise and a television station in the same market. The Clinton administration had persuaded Congress to dial back some conglomerate-friendly provisions by the time the bill came to a vote. But some public-interest advocates still think it accelerates the long-term trend toward more media power in the hands of a few.
The folks in Congress (many of whom have tapped the largesse of the telecom industry in their fund-raising activities) believe the trade-off will ultimately benefit the public, and so does Bill Clinton, who will happily sign the bill. But nobody really knows what will happen in the incredibly volatile world of digital telecommunications. “If this bill is a blueprint, it’s written in washable ink,” says Mark Rotenberg, head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Congress is putting out a picture of how things will evolve. But technology is transforming the industry in ways that we don’t understand yet.”
In some matters the legislature seems to be operating on pure faith. The bill will not stop what Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole was calling an unconscionable giveaway: allowing broadcasters who currently hold some of the valuable space on the broadcast spectrum to, in effect, get the benefit of more channels without paying for them. Better to auction that space off, he said, and reap perhaps $70 billion. Dole dropped his objections after getting an assurance from the FCC that it would allow Congress to revisit the issue. But will Congress later demand an auction that it now resists?
The bill also introduces the so-called V-chip. This little microcircuit, to be socketed into every new television set, is designed to detect shows deemed violent or tawdry – parents can thus program the TV to block such shows. In order for this system to work, video offerings will have to be submitted to rating boards that will determine whether the content merits a red flag. (Question: can we trust the members of these boards to return to society as productive citizens after hundreds of hours of “Walker, Texas Ranger” and Kathie Lee Gifford specials?) Vice President Gore thinks the V-chip marks “the beginning of a new era, to give parents the ability to make choices.” But network-TV executives say they’ll sue to stop it.
Another provision of the bill facing a First Amendment court challenge is the so-called Communications Decency Act. The law of the land will now state that anyone uttering a nasty word in cyberspace (or any other indecency that a minor might confront) is subject to a $250,000 fine and a shuttle bus to the pokey. No one expects the prisons to fill up with foulmouthed nerds, but in its own way that provision is devastating to the Internet in that it assumes that the Net will be treated as a medium akin to broadcast, where speech can be restricted – as opposed to a newsstand, where all sorts of discourse can thrive. “In unleashing the rest of the telecom industry, Congress uses the Internet as the model – it’s deregulated, creative and diverse,” says Jerry Berman, head of the Center for Democracy and Technology. “But ironically, as far as the Internet is concerned, they’re headed in the wrong direction-actually regulating it, putting it in the maw of the FCC.”
Of course, the Internet is racing along so furiously that maybe even government censorship won’t stop it. And only time will tell whether or not the unleashing of the telecom industries will truly lead to the benefits envisioned in this bill – that, as Gore puts it, “removal of artificial barriers to competition will accelerate the amount of investment made in every sector of the industry,” even including Internet-related technologies. As for now, all we have is this week’s scorecard. It tells us that the Baby Bells, the long-distance companies, the cable concerns, the broadcasters and the politicianss are happy. Netheads, civil libertarians and consumer groups are not.
