[Imc] NYTimes.com Article: New F.C.C. Chief Would Curb Agency Reach

[jacobs at uiuc.edu]

This article from NYTimes.com 
has been sent to you by jacobs at uiuc.edu.

This is a disturbing article about our new FCC chairman.

James

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New F.C.C. Chief Would Curb Agency Reach

February 7, 2001

By STEPHEN LABATON

WASHINGTON, Feb. 6 — Signaling a marked departure from his Clinton
administration predecessors, the new Republican-appointed chairman
of the Federal Communications Commission voiced skepticism today
about a wide array of regulations affecting broadcasters, telephone
companies, cable operators and Internet service providers.

 The regulations have been intended to keep the largest companies
from becoming much more powerful, to provide services to those who
can least afford them, and to enable officials to supervise markets
that they say continue to be controlled by monopolies or lack
sufficient competition.

 But the new chairman, Michael K. Powell, speaking at his first
news conference since he was named two weeks ago, articulated a
philosophy that places greater faith in the marketplace to correct
possible problems and he emphasized a sharply reduced role for his
agency.

 Clinton administration officials had maintained that many large
telecommunications companies like the regional Bell operating
companies should be deregulated only after their markets were
sufficiently competitive, but Mr. Powell approached the subject
from the opposite direction today.

 "I do not believe," he said, that "deregulation is like a dessert
that you serve after people have fed on their vegetables and is a
reward for the creation of competition. I believe that deregulation
is instead a critical ingredient to facilitating competition, not
something to be handed out after there is a substantial number of
players in the market."

 With two vacancies on the five-member commission and a third
commissioner likely to be replaced because her term has expired,
Mr. Powell may have an opportunity to significantly reshape the
agency and the government's telecommunications policy. Unlike his
two immediate predecessors at the F.C.C.'s helm, Mr. Powell enjoys
cordial relations with House and Senate leaders. They have taken
the credit for promoting his career and for his latest appointment,
at age 37. Some of them have also indicated a willingness to defer
to his deregulatory approach.

 Consumer groups said that Mr. Powell's comments reflected a deeper
ideological move to the right than they had expected and that a
comment of his belittling the concerns over the growing
technological gap between rich and poor was unnecessarily
inflammatory.

 Gene Kimmelman, co-director of the Washington office of Consumers
Union, said after the Powell news conference: "It's hard to believe
that the average person on the street that has no choice of cable
operators and local telephone services would be enamored with this
kind of deregulation. He's not in touch with how average people
feel about their phone companies and cable companies." 

 Mr. Powell — responding to a question about whether the agency had
a role to play in closing the gap between those who can afford new
technology and those who cannot, something often described as the
"digital divide" — said he thought the commission should do what it
could to "eliminate barriers in every segment of the population and
its geography."

 He then added that he thought "digital divide" was a dangerous
phrase because it could be used to justify government entitlement
programs that guaranteed poor people cheaper access to new
technology, like digital television sets or computers.

 "I think there is a Mercedes divide," he said. "I'd like to have
one; I can't afford one. I'm not meaning to be completely flip
about this. I think it's an important social issue. But it
shouldn't be used to justify the notion of essentially the
socialization of the deployment of the infrastructure."

 Mr. Kimmelman said that Mr. Powell's remarks "were insensitive and
elitist."

 Others said they reflected an ivory tower view of the world.


"Chairman Powell thinks that opportunity grows on trees," said
Andrew J. Schwartzman, president of the Media Access Project, a
nonpartisan group that advocates diversity of the airwaves. "It
doesn't. It's fostered by private-sector and public- sector policy
makers. Ironically in his time in government, Michael Powell seems
to have become isolated from the realities of life for most
Americans."

 In other areas, Mr. Powell questioned several agency assumptions
that the Democrats thought they had settled.

 Mr. Powell said, for instance, that he had a difficult time
providing a proper definition for "public interest," a phrase
salted throughout the nation's telecommunications laws as the
standard that regulators are supposed to apply when they consider
merger and license transfers and allow broad deregulation. That
phrase had been interpreted expansively under Democratic appointees
to justify imposing conditions on several large corporate mergers.

 Mr. Powell said he was a "relative skeptic" of the notion that
government limitations on the size of broadcast companies actually
promote diversity of the airwaves. The nation's largest
broadcasters, notably Viacom, have lobbied to sharply loosen the
rule that prevents them from owning stations that reach more than
35 percent of households in the country, a regulation that has kept
them from buying more stations.

 "I am quite skeptical that anyone has any demonstrable case that
such caps actually inure to the benefit of consumers in the form of
greater and more diverse product," he said. "That's almost a
romantic notion at times and an emotional one, and I think an
important one, but that is more difficult to demonstrate
objectively than to believe subjectively. As an institution of
government, we have to be able to justify on more than just a
sentiment the continuation of a regulatory intervention, and that's
the way I feel about that cap."

 While his predecessors have used the bully pulpit of the
chairman's office to be critical of some material shown on
television, Mr. Powell said that the F.C.C. basically had no
official role to play in controlling violence or other content, or
in seeking legislation that would require the broadcasters to
provide free air-time for political candidates.

 "I think there is a lot of garbage on television," he said. "There
are a lot of things children should not watch. But I don't believe
that government should be your nanny."

 He said he did not regard cable rates going up by more than 30
percent as a sign of failure of the cable deregulation of the last
few years.

 He also said the agency had no role to play in the emerging debate
about whether to transfer to the states the $6 billion federal
program that provides Internet service to public schools and
libraries.

 That program began as an initiative of a group of lawmakers,
working with the F.C.C. and former Vice President Al Gore. In
recent days, Democrats have raised concerns that the program would
die under Republican-floated proposals to convert the program into
block grants to the states.

 "This is another issue everyone wants the F.C.C. to join," Mr.
Powell said today, "and I kind of won't."  
        


http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/07/technology/07FCC.html?pagewanted=1?ex=982642318&ei=1&en=34a27d64c79f7bae

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