The Los Angeles Times Tuesday, June 1, 1999
SPECIAL INTERESTS PUSH OUT PUBLIC INTEREST TELECOMMUNICATIONS
The industry practically wrote the 1996 law, so
why be surprised that it works in industry's favor.
By Robert Scheer
Who's watching the store? In 1996, when Congress passed the
Telecommunications Act and President Clinton signed it into law,
my curiosity was aroused. There were such long lines of lobbyists
and their ilk outside the meeting rooms where markups of the bill
were taking place that something important had to be going on.
Yet every time I tried to read the bill, I was confused and bored.
The language of the legislation was tortured in a way that only
lobbyists could love. They had crafted the bill, wrangling over each
sentence, while congressional staffers, who often privately admitted
they lacked expertise, only pretended to preserve the public
interest. "During the debate on the communications bill, everyone
was protected but the consumer," said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
"I saw senators leave the room to ask special interests how to
vote."
Those special interests got heard because they are major
sponsors of the game called representative democracy. Cable and
local telephone companies alone gave $22.8 million in political
contributions during the five years leading up to the passage of the
Telecommunications Act, which rewrote the ground rules for their
industries.
That money "helped buy them a seat at the table when the
groundbreaking Telecommunications Act of 1996 was being
negotiated," reports the lobbyist monitoring group Common Cause.
"So it isn't surprising that the bill, which was supposed to make
telecommunications industries more competitive and more
responsive to consumer needs, hasn't worked out that way."
In the wake of the act, ownership of the broadcast industry has
been more concentrated and cable TV and pay phone rates have
soared. The biggest news is something called "convergence," in
which telecommunications giants are fighting over the
communications superhighway of the future.
For example, the recent AT&T bid for MediaOne, with the
assistance of Microsoft, has enormous implications for the future of
democracy because it will determine the parameters of a family's
access to news and entertainment. But the mass media we count on
to cover these mergers have an inherent conflict of interest in being
an integral part of the very industry they are reporting on.
The public interest is represented, barely, by the FCC, which is
swamped by these changes and is hobbled by an outmoded
structure built in the days when most of what is now called
telecommunications didn't even exist.
A clear example of the FCC's failure to act in the public interest
concerns the mismanagement of phone number allocations, which
has resulted in endless splitting and overlaying of area codes
throughout the country at considerable expense and inconvenience
to consumers.
Following an outmoded model, which made sense when there
was only one phone company, the FCC continued to allocate phone
numbers in inefficient blocks of 10,000 whenever asked. The old
Ma Bell had no need to hoard numbers it didn't use because it had
no competition. But now there are hundreds of phone companies
competing for this public resource, phone numbers, and the FCC
continued to distribute them in the old way without any
requirement that unused numbers be returned. Consequently a false
shortage was created, causing the near doubling of area codes.
Last week, in a formal notice of rulings, the FCC conceded that
less than 50% of the allocated numbers were in actual use. The
FCC chairman predicted that the current system if not changed
would produce "a catastrophe in the future." If it is not fixed, the
problem would cost between $50 billion and $150 billion to rectify,
according to the FCC.
Fortunately, in response to a public outcry and the appeal by
five states' regulatory agencies, the FCC initiated the process of
mandating that the phone companies report on the number of phone
numbers in use and to return the unused ones for redistribution.
But the lesson in this good news is that the FCC was very slow
to act and is struggling to stay on top of a vast and infinitely
complex telecommunications industry. That industry is using public
resources, be it broadcast spectrum or phone numbers, and the FCC
needs to renew its commitment to do its public monitoring job. We
also need elected representatives and media willing to critically
follow these complex issues so the public can learn in a timely
fashion if the common good is being betrayed for the benefit of
those who can buy influence through advertising and campaign
contributions.
Robert Scheer Is a Times Contributing Editor.
