Telecom Act Rewrite Faces More Partisanship Than in 1996, Speakers Say

Encouraging minority ownership means a “look at where the industry is going, and not always look back to where industry has been,” to “encourage the kinds of opportunities that will meet the industry where it’s going,” said Verizon Senior Vice President of Strategic Alliances and Wireless Public Policy Howard Woolley. People need “platforms” on which “to build innovative products,” he said. Verizon Wireless is working with civil rights groups as it seeks to sell 700 MHz A- and B-block licenses, “considered to be very, very good spectrum for LTE and broadband,” he said. That fits in with the “traditional model” of telecom, “which is you need to go out and own licenses,” Woolley said. There’s no “silver bullet” to update telecom statutes, which should be updated without doing “harm,” said NAB General Counsel Jane Mago.

The problem for blacks isn’t coming up with “good ideas,” of which there’s no “shortage,” but a lack of access to capital for communications endeavors, said National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters Executive Director Jim Winston. He'd “be scared of any legislation that came out of this House, period,” he said of a new telecom law. Since Section 257 of the act didn’t “make this playing field level,” what’s needed is a focus on government agencies “building minority business opportunities,” Winston said. With “terrible partisan issues on the Hill now in terms of whether the FCC really has a role anymore,” the bipartisan consensus in which the 1996 act was passed may not be possible now, Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood said. Moderator Jenell Trigg, a communications lawyer at Lerman Senter, said such bipartisanship came only after the government shut down in late 1995 and early 1996.

The forthcoming FCC Section 257 report likely will say, as past such documents have, that Congress ought to reinstate a tax-certificate program, said Senior Deputy Director Carolyn Fleming Williams of the agency’s Office of Communications Business Opportunities. The last such report sought the deferral of capital gains reinvested in “qualifying communications businesses” and tax credits to sellers offering financing to small firms. It was issued in 2011, 14 months after it was due (http://xrl.us/bn39g5). The final version of the upcoming report is “under review within the agency,” Williams responded to laughter from panelists and the audience to a question from Trigg, who'd asked if the document was circulating for a vote. OCBO, which writes the Section 257 reports, has taken steps in recent years to make them “more meaningful” and a more “forward-looking and not retrospective report,” Williams said.

A minority-owned firm is conducting initial research on “what the American media ecology looks like,” which could be used to see how Americans get news and public-affairs programming, Williams said. The agency had held off on conducting such research for the quadrennial review of media ownership rules that was due in 2010 under the act and is circulating for a vote (CD Nov 30 p22). “A lot more work” is needed to understand how the quadrennial review order rules would change minority media ownership, said Wood. “More concentration means fewer opportunities for those who are locked out today.” Should the FCC seek comments on minority ownership issues before the draft rules are voted on as the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council now seeks (see separate report below in this issue), that might help, said MMTC Executive Director David Honig. A month longer may not be enough, with the commission “rushing forward,” Wood said. “A lot more work” is needed to understand how new rules would affect minority ownership, he said.

Corporate and nonprofit organizations and governments have roles in expanding wireline broadband adoption and extending it to areas that don’t have service much faster than DSL, speakers said on an earlier panel Friday. They cited Comcast’s Internet Essentials $9.95-a-month service for households with kids getting federally-subsidized school lunches, the FCC-led Connect2Compete initiative among ISPs with a similar target audience, projects like Gig.U that bring fast wireline service to college towns and Google’s fiber project in the Kansas City, Mo., area. Public-private partnerships were endorsed by participants including Director John Horrigan of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies’ Media and Technology Institute, Comcast Senior Director Rudy Brioche and IPX International President Derrick McKinney.

Panelists differed on whether such efforts are enough to increase adoption and extend fiber-to-the-home service with speeds that can top 100 Mbps to poorer households. Companies have an economic incentive to “cherry pick” which areas to serve, often focusing on those with wealthier consumers, said McKinney. His very small aperture satellite equipment company is working on an NTIA Broadband Technology Opportunities Program project in Maryland. “If we want to see schools and fire stations and these sorts of things connected to the network, it’s not that companies will often go out and do these things on their own, without anything on the policy side,” he said. “We can’t just rely on the business community to just do the right thing all the time, though I applaud Comcast.” Very fast Internet service isn’t yet “ubiquitous” in the U.S., where not enough is being done to provide applications to handle bandwidth-intensive usage like streaming Netflix video on slower wireline connections like those connected to satellite, McKinney said. “What are we doing to have apps that really increase the productivity of what they can have access to,” he asked of the “thinly connected or the barely connected."

Wireline and wireless broadband both are needed, though the second may never be a substitute for speeds that facilities-based services can reach, Horrigan said. BTOP projects have helped expand wireline broadband, though the “problem hasn’t gone away and more work needs to be done,” he said. There’s been work “to reach deep into communities of need to promote broadband adoption,” he said. Neither government nor companies alone can address demographics with lagging adoption, Brioche said. Government gives a “nudge” to companies, while “community-based organizations” have “the contacts, actually have the trust” of populations with low adoption rates, he said. “A private company cannot do this alone.”