Look to Overall Quality, Not Just Penetration, Adelstein Tells CITI
Quality of service, not just penetration, is important in assessing a country’s broadband achievement, said FCC Comr. Adelstein, speaking at the Columbia U. Institute for Tele-Information CITI-IDATE Conference on the State of Telecom in N.Y.C. Fri. He weighed the positives and negatives of alternative regimes like that of France, whose own telecom regulator was there to defend to a mostly pro- deregulation audience the performance of broadband and IP telecom in what she called France’s sensibly regulated market.
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In France consumers can buy a 30-per-month triple play with 8 Mbps speed, said Adelstein; in the U.S. you can’t get Internet service alone at that speed for that price (about $38). This is why pure penetration numbers don’t tell the whole story of a nation’s broadband success, he said, though the U.S. isn’t really among the leaders in either category. On the other hand, he said, “there are plenty of benefits to this competitive system” in the U.S., “but we need to make sure those get to the consumer.” He suggested an open-minded approach to solutions like unlicensed white spaces access, an advantage our generally less-powerful state mechanism has over France’s because it has power over those spectrum bands.
“Regulation is not the enemy of investment,” said Gabrielle Gauthey, French Electronics Communication Regulatory Authority board member, acknowledging she had a “slightly different angle” than most of the speakers at the conference. “We're not hammering on our incumbents,” contrary to popular perception, she said. “We are in fact deregulating our markets on the retail side.” But the French market is doing fairly well for being a “southern” (non Scandinavian) country on broadband deployment and because it has a balanced regulatory framework that has certain interoperability and deployment requirements.
There’s no need to be obsessive regulators, but states need to get back some of the control taken by the FCC, said Jack Goldberg, vice chmn., Conn. Dept. of Public Utility Control. “States have become less laboratories [of democracy] and just another supplicant,” he said. It’s not a state regulator’s job to “police where the data bits come from,” he said. “We've leapfrogged that.” But policy has a much lower chance of succeeding if there’s no room for flexibility in the states.
Media Consolidation
Both Adelstein and Comr. Copps stressed the importance of keeping media consolidation in check for diverse coverage and cultural programming, Thurs. night at a public hearing on diversity in the broadcast industry hosted by the National Hispanic Media Council (NHMC) at Hunter College in N.Y. and repeatedly stressed diverse public ownership of the airwaves. The NHMC used the meeting to publicize its new report on Hispanic presence in broadcast media, which showed low numbers of Latino experts and commentators on TV news broadcasters, along with a high occurrence of black and Latino crime stories. NHMC Exec. Dir. Ivan Roman said Latinos are “basically invisible, unless we're being portrayed as criminals.”
“Study after study” has shown that despite all their claims of competition, the big broadcasters still touch the largest audiences, Adelstein said. This shapes policy debates, music culture, and the news cycle, he said: “We hear a lot about spreading freedom and democracy around the world but what about improving democracy right here?” he asked to applause. But laws limiting consolidation and abuse of market share would only work “if we truly enforced the law,” he said.
Not only did former FCC Chmn. Michael Powell “eviscerate” rules preventing unwelcome consolidation, said Copps, his Commission did it “all behind closed doors.” That certainly isn’t helping increase ownership and employment for women and minorities in the media highlighted by the competition report Thurs., Copps said. Calling fighting media consolidation “my most important priority since I went to the Commission,” he urged the audience to make it “at least your number 2 issue” because the media controls the flow of information to the community that shapes public opinion and ultimately policy on whichever issues the minority community decides to make “number one.”
The meeting had sharp political undertones. Moderator Alex Morales, NHMC pres., praised the 2 Democratic commissioners for attending, saying they “always show up,” and adding “of course, 3 of them did not show up.” He thanked the Democrats for coming to allow our concerns to go on the public record.” Copps called for an open process as the FCC reconsiders media ownership rules this winter, saying the majority Republican commissioners “should venture out beyond that Beltway they bemoan so much but seem to love staying inside.” Adelstein said the majority commissioners “have forgotten that the airwaves serve the American people.”