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May 13, 2005
Session: Telecomm Act - Mark Cooper, Consumers Federation
Mark Cooper:
It was the first time that he was the least loud and inflamatory person on a panel this morning.
He's proud to say that the 4 court cases he mentioned this morning, Consumers Union and Consumers Federation is a part of all. But court cases are like black holes, that suck in energy, then explode. That's what's going on here in DC. We've frustrated the corporate interests. They said Congress didn't know what they did in 96, the corporations didn't know what was happening with digital media. Russ is right, the legislative battles have already started.
Go home, start a committee of correspondance and write your representatives about what to do and what not to do. This is about a very specific concrete thing the American people want to happen. he will suggest the direction we want to go in. He really believes they have lost control of the means of production in our society. So we must preserve that free speech and fair use.
We also want to do more than perserve what we used to have. We want to ensure that the digital future gives us more stuff. There was a picture a few weeks ago of Bush shaking hands with Sheik Abdullah, that picture was grabbed by all sorts of people and circulated on the web. If the broadcasters have their way, you won't be able to do that. The broadcasters wanted to take the record button off the VCR 20 years ago -- only a 5 to 4 decision.
We need to make sure that we get to have those record and playback button. They'll confuse you with the most technical gobbledygook. But it's simple: We want that record button.
There will be language in the communications Act of 2006 that addresses this issue. We want to share what we have.
We gave the broadcasters this spectrum for Digital TV, they couldn't figure out how to make money out of it. So they didn't use, and because they got it for free they sat on it. Well now they've been sitting on it for 10 years. Almost nobody here has a digital TV, nothing's there. People want that spectrum back, and Congress wants to sell it. They're selling your free speech, to fill the defecit. We thought it was silly to give it away, selling it is worse. We should try and stop them.
If we can't stop them the one thing we can really ask for is the right to use it in the Wi-Fi mode. right now Wi-Fi networks are compacted in what is known as the junk bands. When they let people use the airwaves, a wonderful thing happened, people used it. The same thing can happen in other spectrum that isn't junk. We want the right to share in other spectrum, we can get that.
When we gave the broadcasters the digital spectrum they went from 1 to 6 channels, it's an outrage. The fact that some will have 12 because they own 2 original analog signals, maybe we should take some back. We should also ask for that 1 of the 6 be dedicated to something else. We can ask for that stuff, it won't lower the price they get for selling the other stuff.
We can ask for these things in order to balance out the giveaway of the spectrum. The giveaway shouldn't have happened, but at least we should get something in return. When we get the power to speak it makes a difference.
Network neutrality -- his Paul Revere example. At least since original roads are built, we have forced them to allow anyone to use these networks on a non-discriminatory basis, common carriers, etc. This is a principle that is almost 500 years old in our capitalist tradition.
The final thing we can ask for is with regard to community wireless. We were fighting in Pennsylvania and they asked, why shouldn't the telcos and cable operators be the ones to do this? They're doing a crappy job is one answer, but a better answer is, why do cities build streets? Because if we let corproations do it, they'd only build them to the rich people. We ought to allow cities to build the on-ramps to the information superhighways.
We at least can get Congress to pass a law preventing States from stopping cities from building wireless networks. In the 1996 Act it said any entity can build a telecomm system, but the courts said "any" didn't mean cities. So it's just a small change to existing law to add "cities." Not every city will do it. But it scares the bejesus out of the companies that they'd better do it right or be beat to the punch.
Posted by paul at May 13, 2005 04:45 PM