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May 13, 2005
Session: Telecomm Act - Lauren-Glenn Davitian
Lauren-Glenn Davitian:
She wants to recognize that there is a handful of people, like Mark Cooper, who spend their entire professional life thinking how to deal with congress, FCC and the courts, to protect our rights at a very high level. The work of these people really depends and must be informed by the grassroots.
I came up when public access was one of the few areas where this was being fight. CCTV is putting together a citizen's guide to the 2006 Telecomm Act. It may not be a wholesale rewrite, but it will be a series of changes and additions. She's been reading quite a bit of what people thought about what happened in 1996.
A five minute summary of 4 months of research. She had to start with the 1934 Act, which dealt with radio regulations and telephone monopoly. It created two regulatory regimes, common carrier/telephone, and radio, later known as broadcasting, now known as media. Common carrier is based upon public right-of-way as public proerty. Media is based on spectrum as public property, like the Mississippi River.
So there are public interest requirements. Until 1980 AT&T was an utter monopoly and they were consistently invetigated for monopoly practices.
At the end of World War I the gov't took the assets of American Marconi and split it up to three parties, who acted like a cartel with radio patents. It was essentially broken up, with RCA being the one holding the patents with two networks. The blue became NBC the red became ABC.
Media Consolidation is not new. It's not like we're the first generation to have our panties in a twist about media consolidation.
So the Internet happens, it's a whole new thing where you can transport digital info over phone, air or cable. But cable is not a common carrier, it's considered a publisher/broadcaster in the media category, but still providing broadband service. So we have two different regulatory regimes. Common carrier which requires letting others onto your network, which regulates Telcos.
The other are cable companies, regulated as media. A whole new subcategory called information services, which means they aren't subject to open access requirements.
So the question in the rewrite to the Telecom Act is what regulatory regime should be adopted? the open access common carrier model, or the media, we control who comes on our network model?
How do we take all this complicated legislation for which 2006 is just the next frontier? There will always be another crisis like this.
The way we should respond is through old-fashioned grass-roots organizing. And keep them going over time, because these fights will continue. It's not like it ends after the 2006 act.
To quell the sense of "what do we do now?" it requires the discipline of local organizing. We need to connect the principle of open access to the issues that affect us in local communities.
Every community will see this different. Just like there is nothing like a typical public access TV channel. She thinks the challenge here is to take what we're learning at this event, and the 2006 act in particular, and connect it to the basic principle of public access to public property.
We take that to our local community and try to connect it to what concerns us in our local commmunities. It's about solving problems at a local level. Door-knocking, talking person to person, finding out what really concerns people, and can inform DC and the long-term fight at the state and legislative battles. And the essential long-term local fight is how do we the public take back that local property to set up community broadband and control our own infrastructure.
National, state and local. We need long-term institutionalized community organizing, aggregated across communities. So we can go to Congress with information backed by millions of people who believe the same thing that are willing to stand together for free speech and democracy.
Posted by paul at May 13, 2005 04:47 PM