the Digital Town Hall

All of us who have been pushing for a new National Broadband Plan should be on alert today — and excited that the FCC has taken a vital step toward that goal.

Yesterday, the FCC announced an official “Notice of Inquiry” to get things started. Admittedly, “Notice of Inquiry” sounds pretty dull and lifeless, but it’s anything but. It means that all of our efforts are starting to pay off, but we’ve got a lot more work to do to make sure we get the broadband we need.

What that boring-sounding “Notice of Inquiry” means is that the FCC is, as the agency put it, “seeking input from all stakeholders: consumers, industry, large and small businesses, non-profits, the disabilities community, governments at the federal, state, local and tribal levels, and all other interested parties.”

What that means, in plain English, is the FCC is looking for ideas and goals from just about everyone – but especially from people like you. They want to know what you want from our national broadband and how you think we can get that. This is a critical point in the long hard slog you’ve been engaged in.

Broadband Status: Critical

We’ve seen the country that invented the Internet and pioneered the personal computer drop to 15th in the world in broadband. We’ve talked about it here before, and we’ve worked together to help everyone understand the urgency of building the telecommunications infrastructure our country needs.

That urgency is one of the reasons some of us in Congress made sure there was a provision in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act telling the FCC that we needed a National Broadband Plan. That urgency is one of the reasons we also made sure the stimulus package created grant funding for broadband.

Those grants are a critical down payment on a national strategy to deliver broadband to rural Americans who can’t access it and to urban Americans who can’t afford it.

This is a critically important task we’ve given the folks at NTIA and RUS to administer those grants, and you better believe I’ll be paying close attention to how the grant rules are drafted. I want to make sure we get the biggest bang for the buck from this taxpayer investment.

Julius, Mike and You

I know Julius Genachowski (the President’s nominee to head the Commission) gets it, and Acting FCC Chairman Mike Copps has championed universal broadband for more years than most people even knew it existed.

Mike said yesterday:

"This Commission has never, I believe, received a more serious charge than the one to spearhead development of a national broadband plan. Congress has made it crystal clear that it expects the best thinking and recommendations we can put together by next February. If we do our job well, this will be the most formative—indeed transformative—proceeding ever in the Commission’s history."

So when Julius joins Mike on the FCC, we’ll have some great commissioners to work with. And they need to hear from you.

They need your input on how to build an infrastructure that doesn’t just extend our current broadband, but creates the 21st century telecommunications infrastructure that we desperately need — true broadband speeds of up to 100 mbps. We need to make sure that we lock in the principle of a free and open Internet. And we need a spectrum policy that unlocks innovation and uses our airwaves in the ways that bring our country the most benefit.

Getting the Broadband We Need

Our public airwaves belong to the American people, so we need to make sure we are putting them to good use.

Last year’s 700 MHz auction resulted not only in $20 billion for the treasury but also greater opportunity and choice for consumers and businesses alike. We also took a great step forward when the FCC established a way for unlicensed devices to operate in white spaces.

Now, that’s what I’m talking about.

Those two initiatives are evidence of how valuable spectrum is, and how it is fertile ground for innovation. Last month I introduced the Radio Spectrum Inventory Act with Senator Snowe, which would require the NTIA and the FCC to conduct a thorough inventory of available radio spectrum within 180 days. Once that inventory is complete, we need to make sure we are using that spectrum in the ways that bring the most benefit to Americans.

As chairman of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, I’ll be watching all of this closely and working with Julius and the rest of the Commission to make sure we get the National Broadband Plan we need.

The New Paradigm

Years ago, telecommunications policy was too often dominated by special interests and industry lobbyists. But through the work of so many of you, we now have a lively, democratic, and vital debate going on about the next steps in our broadband policy in this country.

With your passion and insights, you can help steer American telecommunications policy into a new paradigm, one that restores American leadership in this vital part of the global economy.

So stay focused. Stay involved. And get excited about that “Notice of Inquiry.” Because that notice is a clear sign that your hard work is getting noticed.

Change has come to America. Well, sort of.

On "K" Street - home to Washington's most powerful corporate lobbyists - it's business as usual.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the scrum of lobbyists gathering around President Obama's economic stimulus package. Hearings started yesterday in the House Appropriations Committee and they're already lining the halls outside chambers.

Without a strong public interest voice at the table, lobbyists could steer billions in taxpayer dollars toward a corporate welfare boondoggle. This lost opportunity would be felt most acutely in our efforts to close America's gaping digital divide.

Obama has set aside $6 billion for broadband deployment and has been outspoken about the Internet's role in jump starting our "21st century economy," allowing small rural businesses to compete in global markets and giving every child a chance to access fast and open Internet technology.

For Ashea Williams, a special education teacher at Washington D.C.'s Arts and Technology Academy, it's a change that couldn't come soon enough for her young students. "A lot of our students do not have Internet access," she said last week. "So a lot of the activities that we do here at school they cannot expand upon at home. So the learning ends here."

If done right - by building an open and affordable network with plentiful service options -- Obama's economic stimulus plan could close the digital divide for many of Williams' students, and also for those living in rural America.

(Click here to read the rest)

The entertainment industry isn't that different than other industries. Sure, we can tell people what movie star we saw buying fruit at the farmer's market yesterday, but free market principles apply to show business the way they do to any business. Big companies buy smaller companies. Or worse, small companies are shut out, can no longer compete, and close their doors. Whether we talk about WalMart running the independent stores of Main Street out of business, or CBS acquiring CNET, it's all the same principle: consolidation, globalization, and monopolization.

There is an adage in Hollywood that "content is king." But the major media companies who control Hollywood know that, if you control the king, you control the kingdom. So, for the past two decades, conglomerates such as CBS, NBC Universal, Disney/ABC, Fox's News Corp, Time Warner, Viacom, and others have engaged in a sophisticated campaign to control both production and distribution of entertainment content. They have bought up smaller production companies at breakneck pace. They fought to overturn rules requiring their programming be open to diverse voices and independent producers. They have lobbied the Congress to "deregulate" the industry. And their campaign has been extremely successful. Fifteen years ago, nearly 80 percent of television programming was independently produced, today nearly all of what you see on television is owned and produced by the same handful of multinational conglomerates. Americans have learned in the past few weeks from the global financial crisis what we in Hollywood have known for some time - deregulated, consolidated corporations don't always have the best interests of society in mind.

We have also seen what happens historically when companies use their power of distribution to exact ownership and control. A hundred years ago, banking, oil, and railroad trusts developed this model to its maximum potential. Today, the Internet is the new railroad - only faster and more global in reach (and fewer hobos in the boxcars). With the click of a button, this superfast superhighway freely distributes news, information, and entertainment content all over the world. In the past few years Internet users have changed the way news is reported with the advent of independent political blogs and companies like YouTube have made skateboarding dogs, trampoline jumpers, and guys in labcoats dropping Mentos into Diet Coke into worldwide sensations. And this is just the beginning.

A hundred years ago, the trusts had Teddy Roosevelt to bust them. Today, we have an even mightier force. Us.

Creative artists must take full advantage of this new distribution platform, creating independently produced, compelling, and innovative content for the Internet. Joss Whedon created the Internet hit "Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-Long Blog" and Seth MacFarlane gave us his "Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy." An enterprising group of writers, producers, and actors even started their own online TV network at www.strike.tv .

We are standing at the dawn of a new era for the distribution of entertainment content. But the possibilities rely on an Open Internet. Creative artists need an atmosphere free from the unelected gatekeepers that have come to control old media. Where the ability to be successful is based on the material you produce, not the demands of an international conglomerate. An era where content is king and the king roams free.

Openness with regard to broadband media access is about basic human rights - Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers" (UN, 1948).

Openness is essential to support the right to freedom of opinion and expression.

The next generation's platforms for effectively sharing local voices, organizing information and cultural resources, creating open media archives and building open source solutions will require open access to broadband media.

If broadband media are not open, we are at risk of losing basic freedoms. A troubling example of this risk to human rights arose in a case last year involving a commercial provider (Comcast) who was interfering with their customers’ broadband Internet communications – in this documented case, folks were transferring copies of the Holy Bible. FCC Chair Kevin Martin described the issue:

"Would you be OK with the post office opening your mail, deciding they didn't want to bother delivering it, and hiding that fact by sending it back to you stamped 'address unknown - return to sender'? Or if they opened letters mailed to you, decided that because the mail truck is full sometimes, letters to you could wait, and then hid both that they read your letters and delayed them? Unfortunately, that is exactly what Comcast was doing with their subscribers' Internet traffic."

Of course the FCC Chair’s analogy assumes that broadband providers will follow basic Common Carrier principles of openness, such as the US Postal Service. This hopeful assumption underlines some of the crucial policy questions in current “network neutrality” debates before Congress and the FCC – What will become of Common Carriage – including such quaint public interest policies as privacy protection and freedom from censorship? - If as Article 19 suggests, broadband media access is a human right, how can openness be developed and preserved “with liberty and justice for all?”

Sadly, in recent years FCC rules and state laws have been aggressively rewritten by industry to diminish authority of local jurisdictions and to reduce Counties, Cities and local communities’ participation, in exchange for industry promises of increased private investments for closed network upgrades. The supposed benefits of such private investment have not materialized and yet consumer prices continue to rise. Meanwhile across the US community media are being closed and severely damaged, and in many cases local voices are being silenced as media access is derailed and demolished state by state.

And so the openness of our broadband media access is not yet secured.