roundtable: Re: Senate Republican Legislative Memo

roundtable: Re: Senate Republican Legislative Memo

Re: Senate Republican Legislative Memo

Fred G Athearn (fga@world.std.com)
Wed, 18 Jan 1995 07:34:38 -0500 

Date: Wed, 18 Jan 1995 07:34:38 -0500
From: fga@world.std.com (Fred G Athearn)
Message-Id: <199501181234.AA27760@world.std.com>
To: fga@world.std.com, roundtable@cni.org
Subject: Re: Senate Republican Legislative Memo


Vigdor Schreibman speaks of:
>  
> ... considerable discussion about the New Gingrich's  "Magna
> Carta."  What they have in mind is a totaly atomized  public,
> virtually terminating geographic communities and  makeing
> self-interest the global religion, all under a  monopoly and
> oligopoly structure (a.k.a. Rober Baron) control.
 

    I've just read the "Magna Carta" and don't think that the
above is too strong or off the mark at all.
 
     Even though Gingrich isn't given any authorship credit in
the PFF "Magna Carta" I notice that the current "Comment" in The 
Newyorker calls the PFF a "one of [Gingrich's] front groups" and 
the style of it clealry reflects his unique brand of Libertarian 
Theology dressed-up in futuristic costumes.
 
     This is my read on the "Magna Carta": It is a strange
document that puts a lot of not-so-new ideas into a gee wiz pep
talk filled with breathless high tech millennialism and which
along the way offers lots of  old time free-market "libertarian"
bromides not supported with any new agruments but simply claimed
to be the predestined result of a "third wave" that is upon us
and which makes government regulation old hat.
 
     But not until we are ten pages into it does the rubber
finaly hit the superhighway in the discussion of the role of
government in "The Path to Interactive Multimedia Access."
Then all becomes clear  --  this is realy the brief of the big
telephone and cable companies as to why they should be
deregulated and permitted to conglomerate and construct a
national information system on the monster model ( a system
where one large company controls not only the information
pathway but also the things that are sent over it).
 
     Now this isn't clear from just reading the "Magna Carta"
because it seems to be saying just the contrary: that big
government is so "second wave" that it wants to prohibit the
"connecting" of telephone and cable lines and thus ENSURE that
we have scarse bandwith controlled by existing companies. But
this is just more clever obfuscation.
 
     I think that to understand what is realy going on with this
we need to remember why in the last days of last Congress the
telecommunications bill that had seemed to have bipartisan
support all along failed.  The then-minority Republican
leadership presented some "non-negotiable" demands including
that a fixed deadline for total deregulation be added.
 
     The Vice President gave the administration's position on
this in his recient address to the conference of state and local
telecommunications regulators.  He said that simply removing
regulation from industries which had developed over many years
as regulated monopolies without any assurance that there was a
reasonable chance of true competition developing was not a way
to make a transition from monopoly to competition.  He seems to
favor of a kind of rolling deregulation that would only take
place in any market area once the foundation for competition on
an open platform was in place.
 
     We can expect to hear more double talk of the Magna Carta
kind as the leadership of the now-majority Republicans push
their adgenda on telecommunications. I hope the existing
"undemassified" one-way media will clarify this important
debate, but I am not optimistic.

Fred Athearn
Paradise Hill
Bellows Falls
VT  05101

(802) 869-2003 (voice) fga@world.std.com (E-mail)

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