COMR. COPPS SEES BIGGER ROLE FOR FCC FOLLOWING SEPT. 11 ATTACKS
FCC has much bigger job -- to protect public’s interest, chiefly its safety -- than anyone could have imagined just 5 weeks ago, Comr. Copps said Mon. In speech to Federal Communications Bar Assn. (FCBA), he said Sept. 11 terrorist attacks caused many in federal govt. to rethink their agencies’ role. FCC now “must be in the vanguard of our homeland security efforts,” he said. Among first tasks, Copps said, is for Commission and industry to determine which parts of nation’s telecom networks performed well, which failed, repair damage, establish “redundancies” in networks that will allow citizens to communicate during crises, even when one system fails. He cited example of his own family. His son, student at Gonzaga High near Capitol, tried to get through to his parents by wireline and wireless without success. But, much to his worried parents’ relief, he was able to reach them over school’s Internet connection to tell them he was okay. “If Sept. 11 was about anything other than evil, it was about communications,” Copps said, citing “desperate outreach from each of us as citizens to find out what was going on, where our loved ones were, what other threats were coming our way.”
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Copps lauded telecom industry for its “heroic effort” to keep people in touch with one another Sept. 11 despite system overloads and damage to companies’ networks. He said some broadcasters whose towers were destroyed were able to continue on air because their competitors, both cable and DBS, offered to carry their signals in interest of getting as much information to public as possible. Other companies lost vast amounts of money to remove commercial interruptions from vital news coverage, he said.
Terrorist attacks have prompted Commission to address issue of convergence with new sense of urgency, Copps said. Congress already is trying to spread electronic surveillance capabilities across technologies, meaning cable-delivered Internet as well as telephony, he said. “This is the time to stop theorizing about technological and industry convergence and to start dealing with it,” he said, adding that Sept. 11 had shifted regulatory questions about companies’ spanning technologies “front and center.”
Since safety is first responsibility of govt., access to communications for people in rural communities, on tribal lands and other remote areas is critical, Copps said. “I really don’t think it exaggerates much to characterize access to communications in this modern age as a civil right,” he said, and not just basic telephony, but other telecom services as well. He noted that term “public interest” appeared 110 times in Communications Act and that difficulty in defining term didn’t obviate Commission’s duty to serve that end. If FCC stops making decisions based on public interest because that interest is difficult to quantify, “it will be breaking the law,” he said. “I didn’t take an oath to do that.”