Special Interests Push Out Public Interest
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.
