Larry Irving

A self-described pop-culture junkie, Assistant Secretary of Commerce Larry Irving exudes the frenetic aura of the rapidly changing media and telecommunications industry he oversees as head of the department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Since he assumed his post in 1993, he has visited every continent, pitching the Clinton administration’s high-tech mantra of open communications markets. He says he also plows through 150 to 200 e-mail messages each day.

It’s heady stuff for the son of working-class Brooklyn parents. Irving, 43, credits his mother, a social worker, with inspiring him to become a public servant, and he says his affinity for technology came from his dad, who was an electrician for power company Con Edison.

Irving, named one of the 50 most influential people in Newsweek’s “Year of the Internet” issue, graduated form Northwestern University and received his law degree from Stanford University in 1979. He served on the staffs of the late Rep. Mickey Leland (D-Texas) and Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), where he played a key role in shaping the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992, which gave local governments the power to police cable rates under a set of federal rate guidelines. He is married to Leslie Annett Wiley, director of the office of international visitors at the U.S. Information Agency.

Irving sat down for a conversation recently in his spacious downtown Washington office, dominated by a personal computer with a huge monitor and giant speakers. Irving uses the gear to keep abreast of the sprawling Internet, especially its mushrooming multimedia content.

The equipment also allows him to indulge his favorite passions: sampling audio and video clips downloaded from the Web. He lamented that this is a joy not enough people are able to indulge in because of the cost of getting connected to the Internet. He said the administration is seeking to change that.

In discussing his work, Irving credits his former boss, Leland, onetime chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, for helping to crystallize his views on how the media wields influence over politics, power and race in America.

Question: You have said your interest in technology was stoked by the fact that people of color have little or no influence in the media.

Answer: Minorities are totally underrepresented as players in the old media. And one of the things we have been trying to do in the Clinton administration is to make sure that underrepresentation does not become a fact in the new media as well. We’ve got a situation right now where, in the aggregate, Native Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans and African Americans combined own less than 3% of all the broadcast licenses in the country and less than 1% of the television licenses. To my knowledge, there is exactly one national cable-program service owned by any ethnic minority, and that’s BET [Black Entertainment Television]. There are Spanish-language services, but they are not owned by minorities.

Q: Why are those statistics important?

A: Because that’s how the political debate in this country is shaped. That’s how people learn about other cultures. The editorial prerogative belongs to that person who owns the station. And you don’t have a voice if you don’t own one of those outlets. What white America and what the rest of the world knows about people of color in this country is filtered through the editors, who are almost never people of color.

Q: Are you suggesting that a black owner, like BET’s Robert Johnson, is contributing more to social discourse by devoting much of his cable network to airing rap-music videos than are Oprah Winfrey or Bryant Gumbel, whose shows are carried on white-owned television networks?

A: Bob Johnson makes a determination 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year as to what you are going to see. Oprah is an hour a day, five days a week. Having people like Bryant Gumbel and Oprah Winfrey in positions on the mainstream media is something that Rep. Ed Markey and Mickey Leland and [the late Commerce Secretary] Ron Brown and Al Gore and Bill Clinton have fought for. But they have also fought for, and I have fought for, giving people the opportunity to own those outlets. There are a number of services that BET provides that are unique. Jazz was not on 24 hours a day until Bob Johnson made an investment in [the cable channel] BET on Jazz. Now, all of a sudden, a rich, historical part of our culture is available to people who have that service.

Q: American Online recently announced a $4.2-billion purchase of Netscape Communications. Some longtime users of the Internet fear this is yet another example of how the educational, information and chat sites that sprouted in the Internet’s early days are being subsumed by commercialism that is likely to grow even more pronounced as companies like AOL attempt to earn back their enormous investments. Is there any concern in the administration about pushing into our schools and libraries a medium that seems bent on selling Web surfers something everywhere they go?

A: I can’t speak to the AOL-Netscape deal because I’m sure the FTC [Federal Trade Commission] or Justice Department will be looking at that from an antitrust concern. And I don’t want to prejudge that. But I can talk about commercialization of the Net. Somebody’s got to pay for what’s on the Net. I go on the Net all the time. I see all the ad banners and that doesn’t particularly bother me, because that means I pay less for that Net service, and this is a commercial world.

I got excited about the Net when I saw the Louvre on the Net. I got excited about the Net when I got the first chords of Miles Davis online. I got excited about the Net because I live here in Washington, D.C., but I can listen to every Northwestern game, every Stanford game and every New York Giant game online over the Internet.

But a lot of those social things are not going to pay for themselves unless somebody subsidizes them and supports them. If the cost of me being able to go to chat rooms and talk to people about issues of political interest or artistic interest to me, if the cost of going to the Louvre online or the Smithsonian online, if the cost of that is that I have to put up with some ads, it’s worth it to me. It’s just like ads on TV. You filter out what you don’t want to see.

Q: But you are an adult, an intelligent one, and you can make those determinations about what you don’t want to buy and which are reliable retailers. But we are talking about taking this roiling commercial world into our classrooms, where presumably children are going to see these ads. We don’t have the commercial TV networks in classrooms. Is there a role for government to play with respect to privacy and ensuring that children and others--say, the elderly--aren’t taken in by an onslaught of commercialism?

A: Anything that is illegal offline should be illegal online. The FTC, consumer-affairs offices and state attorneys general have every right and responsibility and obligation to protect the online community. But I don’t think we need a new set of regulations. With regard to privacy, we’ve been trying to push industry toward self-regulation to protect people’s privacy. One of the biggest problems we have, in terms of having more people use the Net, is their concern about privacy. There are two different concerns: One, will their credit card numbers get stolen? And two, will people have more information about their purchases, lifestyle and families than they want them to have? And that is something the industry has got to respond to.

We’ve also said children are different, and we need even stronger standards to protect them.

Q: You have been one of the principal architects of technology policy in the Clinton administration since Vice President Al Gore introduced the phrase “information superhighway” to the American lexicon. How well has the administration done in developing the information highway?

A: We have not developed the information superhighway. We have developed a policy framework, so that the private sector can develop the information superhighway. The key to what the president and vice president and [Commerce] Secretary [William M.] Daley want is that they don’t want government steering. They don’t want government developing. They want to help drive this economy, make this a better country. . . .

This government is using technology very effectively to help the average American. When we do the census next year, all that information will be online. You need a loan from the Federal Emergency Management Agency? It’s online. You need to do your income tax? It’s online.

When I took this job, in 1993, that didn’t exist. We are using technology to improve the lives of people in this country, and that’s a good thing.

Q: A key administration concern has been ensuring universal access to telecommunications services. You have spoken out often on this. Why is it so important?

A: Because the reality is that new jobs being created require technology skills. And there’s another thing. We just had an election last month. Every major-party candidate for Senate or governor, except for one, had a Web site where information was available. When the big news events of the past several months have happened, when there have been releases of reports from the independent counsel, when [Sen.] John Glenn went up into space, people went to the Internet for that information. Increasingly, it is how you get information. It is how you do business.

Q: I don’t think anyone would disagree with the benefits you cite that the Internet brings. But what some critics ask is: Should the government subsidize people’s access to fancy, new technologies?

A: As a nation, we made a decision 60 years ago that we were going to make sure that everybody had access to a telephone. We have a universal-service commitment that is 60-plus years old. As we go into new technologies, we’ve got to make a determination as to how we ensure people have access.

Q: But we have achieved 90%-plus TV ownership without subsidies. And wireless telephones and pagers have penetrated even the poorest communities. Why is it necessary, then, for the government to subsidize Internet access when competition is driving prices down so rapidly that some Internet services, like e-mail and Web-page hosting, are already free?

A: We cannot have a society in which educated, suburban African Americans, Hispanic American and white Americans have and use this technology and poor people, particularly poor minorities, consider the information revolution nothing more than a rumor. We’ve got to make sure there is some equity of distribution.

And we are not talking about massive social programs. We are not talking about putting an Internet connection in everybody’s home. We are talking about getting an Internet connection to everybody’s neighborhood, so that people have a school or library or community center where they can go access it. There shouldn’t be a kid in this country that graduates from school that can’t do the Internet. . . .

Why is it that an African American boy, 15 years old, will go out and play basketball for 15 hours and think he can grow up to be Michael Jordan. Then, on the weekend, he’ll be on his computer for 15 hours and not think about being Michael Dell [chairman of Dell Computer Corp.]. Michael Jordan makes about $100 million a year; Michael Dell’s net worth increases by about $100 million a month. Which one do you want your son to be?