FCC Looks for Valley Support of Broadband Plan
[Source: Silicon Valley Mercury News, by Mike Swift, June 11, 2010]
Hoping to enlist Silicon Valley in the upcoming battle in Washington over whether the Federal Communications Commission can spark the creation of a national broadband system, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said Wednesday at Stanford University that the future health of the nation's democracy is at stake if a few "gatekeepers" control access to the Internet.
In a strongly worded talk preceding meetings with executives at Google and Apple, Copps told members of the Churchill Club, a Silicon Valley business and technology forum, that the building of a national broadband system is like the canals, railroads, interstate highways and telephone and electrical systems built by earlier generations.
"Increasingly, our national conversation — our news and information, our knowledge of one another — will depend on the Internet," said Copps, who called a national high-speed Internet system linking most homes and businesses "America's great enabler" of job creation, education and solutions to problems like global warming.
It remains unclear whether the FCC will be able to move forward with that vision. A federal appeals court ruling in April cast doubt over whether the agency has legal authority to enact the sweeping national plan that it released in March, which would revamp the federal program that subsidizes telephone service and use it to pay for broadband instead.
In response, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced in May that the agency would propose a compromise in how it regulates high-speed Internet access: It would reclassify broadband as a "telecommunications service" rather than an "information service," which could be regulated the way the agency regulates telephones, but exempting broadband from many rules that govern phones. The FCC needs that legal authority to move ahead with "network neutrality" rules prohibiting phone and cable companies, such as Comcast or AT&T, from acting like "gatekeepers," prioritizing or discriminating against Internet traffic traveling over their lines.
Google and many other Internet companies are strong supporters of network neutrality. The plan proposed by Genachowski, a Democrat, has drawn opposition from Republicans in Congress, with the House minority leader, John Boehner, calling it a "government takeover of a large portion of the private sector."
Copps called those claims "hogwash," but he said that with lobbyists for cable and telephone companies and other opponents of the plan deploying their troops in Washington, Silicon Valley leaders need to weigh in. "Make no mistake about it, this is not going to be an easy fight," he said. "One reason for me to come out here is to emphasize the need for working harder and working together when our needs coincide, and they do now."
A Google spokeswoman, Mistique Cano, confirmed that Copps visited the Googleplex Wednesday to discuss Google's support for the broadband plan, as well as Google's plans to enter the television business later this year through partnerships with Sony and other companies, but she declined to discuss the meetings in detail.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
In other remarks, Copps said the FCC has a growing interest in the quality of journalism, hinting that he would support some sort of public subsidy for the beleaguered news business. Citing statistics showing a 50 percent decline in the newsgathering capacity of broadcast television, and a 30 percent decline in the newsgathering capacity of newspapers, Copps said, "new media has not found a model to replicate online what has been lost offline."
"We don't have a model to support the level and the kind of journalism our democracy requires," he said, citing data that 95 percent of original newsgathering is done by newspapers or broadcast television, including much of the content available online. "This is one of the biggest problems the country faces right now."
