Society but i was also a believer in a tough approach to the soviet union which means i had ready 30 much at home in the Democratic Party at the time. You had pat point hand. You had Henry Jackson a great senator from Washington State and later on that element of the Democratic Party shrunk to nothingness. And as it did i was without a home. I remained generally without a political home. You could obviously fairly call me a neoconservative then. Host s been 18 years since the 1996 telecommute nations act was enacted by congress and signed by president clinton. Today on the communicators we are going to discuss that its goals and whether or not it should be rewritten rewritten. Joining us are two of the authors of the 1996 Telecommunications Act rick boucher who is a democrat from virginia served in congress from 1983 to 2011 and jack sub 3a republican in texas from 1981 to 97. Congressman feels what was your role in the development of the 96 pelka medications act . Guest it was actually very fortunate. I was the chairman of the subcommittee of telecommunications and finance and telecommunication policy had not in reform since 1934 so there was really a compelling need in 1995 to begin a process of massive telecommunication reform and at that time you basically had ox is. You had a box for broadcasters, a box for Telephone Companies a box for longdistance you know, cable, satellite and our view was we had to come in and eliminate the last lines of demarcation and promote competition that would be more investment more Consumer Choice more innovation and fortunately i think the result has proven us correct and thats exactly what has happened. But now we are in a situation you know not that many years later that there needs to be again i think a massive overhaul in light of all the new technology and all the new applications in the new modes of service. Host rick boucher you have worked on telecommute occasions for a long time as a member of congress. If congress understand what was going on with the 96 Telecommunications Act or was it few members . Guest well as is often the case the committees focused on particular subject matter and take the lead in this reform. Jack was chairman of our subcommittee. Other members of our subcommittee had been focused on telecommunications for many years and in some cases decades. We were certainly well prepared for this reform. There was a larger Interest Group of members of congress. Other members of the energy and Commerce Committee who were not on the subcommittee. Other members of the house and senate who are equally focused on the need for reform and what was unique i think about at that point was we had a large interest in in the public community. Recognizing that fundamental changes have taken place in technology. Fundamental changes had taken place in the marketplace and the laws that were written for an earlier era were actually imputing, imputing investment, prohibiting the kinds of competition that we thought would well serve the consumer interest so the barriers in that law were taken down. That was the fundamental achievement of the 96 act. Telephone companies were able to offer Cable Tv Service in their Telephone Service areas. Cable companies and others were given the opportunity to offer local Telephone Service so that market for the first time became competitive. Once the local Telephone Exchange have proven to be open for local phone companies were given the right to offer nationwide Long Distance and they were also given the right to manufacture Telecommunications Equipment. So markets that had been segregated, markets that were largely monopolies prior to 1996 were made competitive and decades of innovation and investment were unleashed and today we stand on the cusp of another reform because we also have fundamentally different technologies today that have outstripped the regulatory environment. And it created the need for the next comprehensive rewrite of the Telecommunications Law. Host jack fields so much of the 96 act was about longdistance and local Telephone Companies. Two things we dont even think about today was the internet address and the wireless address in the digital address. Guest we really didnt have my opinion and i will give you the best example. As the chairman of the subcommittee i wanted to meet with bill gates and try to get a vision of what he thought the future would be and i couldnt get him and his colleagues to come to washington. I actually had to go to seattle to meet with them and if you look at 96 act theres only one small provision that deals with the internet. And so there is a real need to come back and look at where the act falls short and what needs to be done. I will encourage my colleagues when they do this to do what we did not do. We try to make the act as open as we possibly could so that could get involved with technology and everything we thought was going to happen in the future. I was very disappointed with what the federal Communication Commission did subsequent to the passage of the act. I think much of legislative intent was lost and so my encouragement is going to be that those who do the rewrite be as prescriptive as they can so there is you no, a small chance the federal Communication Commission will come in and add their own content to it. Host what is an example of the legislative intent they lost . Guest we came up with a checklist of what the Telephone Companies had to do to enter Long Distance and open the same day to longdistance companies to offer local Telephone Service and in my opinion that interpretation went far too long. I think it went outside of what was an originally intended and so again when it comes to writing the bill this time i think legislators need to be as prescriptive as possible to direct to the federal Communication Commission and anyone else that has to review the acts the Justice Department etc. So its narrow so that we preserve what lawmakers intended when they pass the bill. Host rick boucher because congress hasnt enacted another conference of Telecommunications Act in the last 18 years has it fallen to the fcc to take over regulation where they see necessary . Guest i think to a large extent the answer to that is yes because today the world is moving into clear directions. One is its going wireless and the other is that its going to the internet protocol for the delivery of information of all kinds. When the 96 act was written they were largely focused on Telephone Service whether it was local or longdistance. To some extent we focused on Cable Tv Service and we wanted to take steps to make that market competitive, which we did but the primary focus was really what we call plots, plain old Telephone Service and the landscape is fundamentally different. The fcc has managed as well as it can without clear direction from congress about how the transition from the era of Telephone Service to the time when everything is delivered over the internet should take place. And in my mind the fcc has done a good job. I will cite just one example. Chairman tom wheeler chaired a task force inside the fcc before he was chairman. Its their Technical Advisory Task force and in that role he produced a report that recommended that by the end of this decade the old circuit switched Telephone Network sunset and there were Important Reasons for that to happen. That Network Today is wearing out. Its so so old and fact that people have moved on beyond that to such a great extent that the Telecommunications Equipment manufacturers in many cases are not even making Replacement Parts for that old network. The result is that the cost of maintaining it are just soaring. Under current law Telephone Companies must maintain the old network as if it was the Core Communications medium used by everyone. But in point its only used exclusively by 5 of the public and its use by another 29 in combination with a Wireless Service so in total about 33 of the public is using that old network and twothirds have abandoned it altogether. But under current law that has to be maintained as if it served everyone. The cost of maintaining it are draining investment from the internetbased services and the broadband architectures that consumers have indicated they preferred. And where they can get dramatically more expanded and more functional services and do so in a way that modernizes their Communications Access and capabilities enabling them to communicate wirelessly as well as by wired medias. The investment needs to be focused on the broadband future and the commission and saying its time to sunset the Circuit Switched Network is forecasting that clear need and putting in place a thoughtful process based on having demonstration projects and some selected markets around the country to find out what happens, what essentially goes wrong when people are rapidly moved from the old Circuit Switched Network to more modern Broadband Networks. Then in advance of the National Transition towards the end of this decade Solutions Based upon those perceived problems can be put in place. So your question was has the fcc to undertake an regulation in the absence of clear statutory direction . I think because the 96 act didnt focus on broadband and really didnt focus on internet protocol delivery the fcc has to a large extent been left to its own devices in that area and in my judgment its done a good job. I think chairman of wheeler and his colleagues are on the right track in setting up demonstration projects, finding out what happens when you transition people to Broadband Networks and making sure that core consumer values are protected as that process goes forward. And that is a very substantial step which i think the fcc has handled quite well. Host should there be a reclassification of Broadband Services from communications into Communication Services . Guest i think thats a question that has to be looked at but i want to go back to what rick said just a moment ago. Tom wheelers a friend and i think he is doing an excellent job and certainly his background here in washington gives him a very unique position in which to help fashion the fcc and make good decisions but i still believe that when legislators come up with a comprehensive reform they need to be as direct and as plain as possible so legislative intent is preserved. That would be my encouragement to them. Host what do you think you got wrong with the 96 act . Guest i can answer that question and i dont want to be repetitive but i come back and tell people that i think we shouldve been much more prescriptive. We made a conscious decision to leave latitude in legislative language so that it would evolve with technology and i think that was a mistake. That is why i would encourage people not to do that again. Going back to what we did the head a clear cut path that we announced in early 1995 that we were going to do hearings within a certain period of time combat that we would have our markups markups markups and be out of the committee by may and be off the floor by july and hopefully being conference with the senate in september or october which we were. We felt like we had to leave the process and rick was on our team. It was a bipartisan effort. When you go back and look at the 96 act, there was very little opposition in the subcommittee, very little opposition in the full committee, very little opposition on the floor and we actually had a very Good Conference gradea think much of that was as rick alluded people had worked on this for years. My counterpart was ed markey. Ed and i are philosophically different but we came together thinking it was in the best interest of the American People to come up with the new policy framework which we did and policy framework predicated on competition with this little Government Intervention and regulation as possible and i think that is what is needed again today. Host some former fcc commissioners and other people have said in testimony in congress that the act does not need to be rewritten. Perhaps piecemeal legislation. Guest i think some fundamental things have to be done and they have to be done legislatively. The rewrite is in the eye of the observer but there are fundamental pieces that have to be addressed. For example the current regulatory structure at the fcc is a throwback to the earlier time when cable Companies Offer cable service, phone Services Offered phone service. You have a wireless entrant but its fairly new. Theres nothing that speaks specifically to the internet which is in a very early stage of commercial development at the time we wrote the 96 act and because you have different arrows writing different rules for these various companies you can get disparate regulation. You have to bear in mind that these companies are competing headtohead with each other offering exactly the same products. They are offering a voice. They are offering data and video and they are doing so in a very hardfought headtohead competition, and they should be regulated the same way. So realigning the fcc structure in order to meet the realities of the marketplace where you no longer have silos but you have serious crossplatform competition is fundamental to making sure that the regulation enjoys parity and that companies are not given an advantage or disadvantage because of the regulatory environment. Only congress can do that. The fcc cannot realign the structure that is establishestablish ed by statute so you can start with that. We also have a spectrum launched today and rapidly the spectrum is available was being outstripped by the demand for mobile services. Carriers are experiencing the order of magnitude increases over a very short timeframe in the demand for mobile data. We have got to find creative ways to get more spectrum allocated from government holders who in many instances have an excess of spectrum through the commercial launching process and into the hands of the commercial carriers. The current way we do that just isnt working. Its extraordinarily slow. The allocation process takes forever and even after an agency is told to vacate a spectrum it can take years for them to move away from it to make that available for commercial auction. So i think Congress Needs to be really innovative in the way it addresses this. Maybe some incentive should be provided to agencies so that spectrum is vacated more rapidly and made available for the commercial carriers. Some have even suggested that we use a kind of a base closing approach for this. After the cold war when it was clear we had to Close Military bases and it was hard to do that because members of congress would fight vociferously in order to keep the base open in their district and have their colleagues support them in the process. It was very difficult to do it through the regular legislative process. So Congress Passed a statute that created a commission, the base closing commission. Periodically that commission evaluates what basis can be closed and those that can be downsized. It recommends a list back to congress. Then that list is put to an upordown vote with no amendments being ordered on the floors of both a house in the senate and every time that list has been presented to the congress four or five times now since the end of the cold war, it has passed. Maybe we need to have an tia or perhaps an independent commission evaluate the spectrum thats in the hands of Government Agencies can see what is accessed. What could be commercially auctioned and then put that to an upordown vote that list as produced by the agency or an independent body of some sort. It certainly worked for base closing. Maybe it will work for this but you know what im suggesting is congress be creative in the way it addresses the need to get more spectrum into the hands of the commercial carriers and the majority of the spectrum that really can be made of old available for that relatively quick he is in the hands of government. Host rick boucher do you see at some point wireless and internet ip becoming being reclassified as essential Services Rather than Information Services . Guest im not going to go there. I dont think its necessary in order to do that. I agree with jack that Congress Needs to be very precise and in directing the fcc. With regard to what