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I have spent a good part of this year preparing testimony for various and sundry congressional subcommittees having to do with Telecommunications, so it comes as no surprise to see old friend Reed Hundt, the FCC czar, vent his frustrations regarding the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
The reason for Hundt’s outburst during a recent speech at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC can be summed up in one word, Lawyers. In replying to his own question as to whether the Telecommunications Act of ’96 is actually working, Hund t summed up by stating “the answer is we have scarcely any competition in the local markets. That pace of investment and new entry is too slow; the success of our country’s national deregulatory effort is jeopardized by the delays, missteps, and complexi ties of our legal culture.”
The FCC Chief’s talk can best be described as a study in rage and frustration aimed squarely at the legal community that has tied the Telecom Act in knots for the past year and a half. “When it comes to legislation, between the thought and the deed falls the shadow. The shadow is cast by the million lawyers of America,” said Hundt.
Hundt started his discourse by comparing Congress and the FCC to Adam and Eve with the FCC being the agency created by Congress like Eve from Adam’s rib, and then cast adrift in a paradise of free competition, growth and deregulation. By the end he was c omparing the relationship to the first family in Milton’s Paradise Lost where the FCC and Congress as Adam and Eve are “being exiled hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow from the Eden of promised deregulation into the harsh desert of legal culture… with its thousand devices of tortuous delay and tortured questioning of every phrase, word and punctuation mark of the Telecom Act.” I am not quite sure what this says about politics, or the state of affairs in our Nation’s capital, when you can take a young Yale Law grad from Michigan and dump him in amongst a nest of vipers and have him come out a few short years later drawing co mparisons to Adam and Eve and quoting Milton.
Having personally witnessed the interminable bickering over the word “cost” and the word “and” as in the phrase “business and residential,” I can assure you I can feel Hundt’s pain and understand why he has resigned as chair of the FCC. I guess the final nail in his coffin came when Southwestern Bell, having spent years lobbying for the Telcom Act, now argues that the Act is unconstitutional.
Who needs Spam with all this Pork available?
Our Congress, the same Congress that can’t define “indecent,” or “pornographic,” is now taking on …that’s right…SPAM. So far this year there are no less than three bills in the works to protect us from so called “Unsolicited Commercial Electronic E-mail” or UCE as SPAM is now officially called.
First up to bat is HR 1748, the Netizen Protection Act of 1997 sponsored by Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ). This bill would amend the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 which outlaws junk faxes to include junk e-mail. This bill would ban outright unwante d e-mail unless the sender has a previous relationship with the recipient or in cases where the recipient has requested the material. Penalties for violations range from $500 to $1,500 per incident.
Next up is S 771, The Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail Choice Act of 1997, authored by Sen. Frank Murkowski (R-AK). This bill would require all junk e-mail to start the subject line with the word ‘advertisement’. The idea being it would allow consu mers to “request service providers to screen out all such messages.” Oh boy, another attempt to turn ISPs into ‘Net police.
Finally we have the Electronic Mailbox Protection Act of 1997, S 875 by Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-NJ). Torricelli’s bill would make it illegal to send e-mail from false “from” addresses and outlaws the practice of registering new domains to avoid filteri ng detection. In addition, the bill would require bulk e-mailers to honor “unsubscribe” requests and would prohibit American companies from moving their junk e-mail operations offshore to escape the reach of U.S. Law.
Before leaving foggy-bottom let’s visit a moment with Rep Joseph McDade (R-PA) who has introduced HR 1180 the Family-Friendly Internet Access Act of 1997. This little gem would require ISPs to provide content screening software “to permit the customer to limit access to material that is unsuitable for children,” adding that “such software shall be provided either at no charge or for a fee that does not exceed the cost of such software to such provider.”
Before turning the local ISP into a ’net cop I think it would be wise for the Representatives to at least visit with some System Administrators first. They would probably come away wondering why these people are still among the free in the first place.
The rush is on. 82 million PCs on the Internet and growing.
Dataquest, Inc., the San Jose, CA market research folks, are at it again. They have just nailed down a comprehensive survey that shows the number of computers connected to the Internet has jumped 71 percent over the last year to 82 million and is expecte d to more than triple to 268 million by 2001. Most of this growth is expected to come from businesses connecting their employees to the ‘Net.
“By 2001, it will become nearly pointless to pay for a desktop computer for an employee without including Internet access,” said Kathryn Hale, a Dataquest analyst. “A PC is an information conduit, and you need a link to the outside world.”
This “gold rush” is expected to generate about $12.2 billion in software and service sales this year and $32.2 billion by 2001 as the unwashed hordes hook their bumpers to the info-highway. It seems everybody either wants to buy or sell something on the Internet. Can you spell GREED? Greed is good, someone said, probably Bill Gates, but that is another story.
Probably the biggest user of the Internet is Cisco Systems, a San Jose maker of computer networking products. Cisco sells more than $5 million worth of products a day over the Net to Fortune 500 companies, resellers and partners. “More than 138,000 softw are products were downloaded from our site in July,” a Cisco spokesman said. “It is absolutely incredible. By just distributing software over the Net, we save more than $130 million in operational costs this year.”
This is followed by Dell Computer who is on pace to sell about $500 million worth of PCs over the ’net this year and the automobile industry connecting their parts and dealer network.
The Dataquest survey is more Bullish than most regarding commerce on the Internet but those in the know don’t dispute the results.
Al Massey is a HAL-PC member.
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Last modified: 1997:09:30