[IP] The Reluctant Planner - Interview with FCC's Mike Powell
Begin forwarded message:
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: December 22, 2004 11:46:50 PM EST
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Reluctant Planner - Interview with FCC's
Mike Powell
Reply-To: dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
The Reluctant Planner
FCC Chairman Michael Powell on indecency, innovation, consolidation,
and competition
Interviewed by Drew Clark, Nick Gillespie, and Jesse Walker
<http://www.reason.com/0412/fe.dc.the.shtml>
His decision to loosen media ownership rules “insulted your
intelligence and wounded democracy,” one newspaper columnist declares.
He’s obsessed with “trying to save America’s virtue,” writes another.
He has presided over “an end to an era of competition,” a consumer
advocate argues. He’s Michael K. Powell, 41, arguably the most
controversial chairman in the history of the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC), the central planner charged with overseeing the
structure and details of telecommunications in America.
As a young man, Powell joined the Army, following in the footsteps of
his father, Secretary of State Colin Powell. After a back injury ended
his military career, he took up law, graduating from Georgetown
University Law Center in 1993. In 1997 the Senate selected him to be
one of the two Republican commissioners at the FCC. (The agency has
five commissioners, three traditionally picked from the governing party
and two from the opposition.) When George W. Bush became president, he
tapped Powell for the top job.
There are two ways to look at Powell’s performance in office. One is
the way Powell portrays himself: as a “Reagan-era child” eager to
lighten the government’s burden on the communications industries. This
Powell has a vision of digital convergence—of a market where cable,
telephone, cellular, and satellite companies compete to sell bundles of
video, voice, and data packages across Internet-style networks—that is
finally gaining traction in the market and in Washington. In this
coming world, he argues, government regulation is much less necessary.
That Powell applied the same deregulatory principle to long-established
limits on the number of television stations a single company can own.
Powell and the other two Republican commissioners approved a modest
plan to liberalize those regulations in June 2003, but it was a Pyrrhic
victory. Public interest groups denounced the move, and legislators
retightened some of the rules. Others were overturned by the U.S. Court
of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit.
That’s one perspective on Powell. Another view argues that the chairman
isn’t the deregulator he’s reputed to be—that in fact, he’s made the
government more intrusive. His FCC has pushed an industrial
policy–style mandate for digital television (DTV), and last year it
forced TV and computer manufacturers to include anti-copying tools in
their products. In August the agency took a similar step with Internet
telephones, requiring them to install surveillance-friendly wiretap
equipment in the name of homeland security.
And while Powell’s proposed changes to the media ownership rules were
deregulatory in many ways, they would have tightened the caps on how
many radio stations a company may own, while grandfathering in most of
the acquisitions that predated the rule change. Worse, the chairman
seems more interested in letting existing broadcasters merge than in
letting new broadcasters emerge: During the Clinton years, he voted
against a plan to license new low-power outlets on the FM band, citing
the possible “economic impacts” on incumbent stations.
Then, too, politics has forced Powell to eat some of his deregulatory
words. Where he once wanted to re-evaluate rules governing “indecency”
in broadcasting, he now enforces them with a vengeance. His agency has
issued 21 fines—and two consent decrees—for $4.7 million within the
last year.
In August—one month prior to issuing the biggest fine of all, a
$550,000 slap at CBS owner Viacom for its role in the Super Bowl
halftime show featuring Janet Jackson’s bared breast—Powell sat down in
his office to discuss these issues with reason Editor-in-Chief Nick
Gillespie, reason Managing Editor Jesse Walker, and Drew Clark, senior
writer for National Journal’s Technology Daily.
reason: What would you say of someone who said, “There is nothing
unique about the scarcity of radio frequencies.…Rather than continuing
to engage in willful denial of reality, the time has come to move
forward toward a single standard of First Amendment analysis that
recognizes the reality of the media marketplace and respects the
intelligence of American consumers.”
Michael Powell: It sounds like you’re reading a speech of mine.
Reason: From 1998.
Powell: I thought it sounded familiar.
I completely agree. Do you think a 12-year-old knows what a broadcast
channel is? Do you think that they have any idea what the differences
between Channel 4 and Channel 204 are? Do you think that the First
Amendment ought to change as the dial changes?
I don’t. To suggest that we bend the First Amendment for one industry
singularly is to do hazard to our most cherished principle.
Reason: What’s changed in the six years since you made the speech?
Powell: Nothing’s changed, and that’s part of the problem.
Reason: But you’re talking a lot more about indecency now.
Powell: Yeah. It’s quite consistent, actually. The indecency laws,
first of all, are statutes. The people of the United States, through
legislation, have made indecent speech between the hours of 6 a.m. and
11 p.m. over only one medium, broadcasting, unlawful. They have
invested in this commission authority to enforce that law. The
commission does it in response to the complaints from the public. Many
people have tried to argue that we should be like the FBI on indecency
and be affirmative, that we should go out and listen to television and
radio. We don’t do that. We wait for the American people to complain,
and then we act on complaints. What has happened in the period you’ve
identified is indecency complaints have skyrocketed.
Reason: So you can take complaints. But why do you actually need to
levy fines against someone who uses, say, an expletive in a passing
phrase, as Bono did at the Golden Globes?
Powell: The statute says two things. It makes indecency unlawful, and
it makes profanity unlawful. How do you say it’s not profane? It’s in
the criminal code, which means John Ashcroft could theoretically go try
to slap handcuffs on you. Now, nobody expects that, but there’s nothing
about that statute that says otherwise. If the f-word’s not profane,
then I don’t have any idea what profanity is in America. Presented
squarely with a case like that, it became very difficult to say it’s
not profane, even though I think you could debate whether it’s
indecent.
Reason: But this was the first case where you’ve used a profanity
standard.
Powell: In the past there are some profanity cases linked to blasphemy.
But I don’t see anything in [the definition of] profanity that says
“f-you” is OK but “f-God” is the only thing we care about.
[snip]
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