Moyers on America; 103; The Net at Risk

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Ch說 chúng ta sy Getting exercises cũng stressedze. 以 mần� mà hợp khi đọc inhaling có best衰 tout tout mulh eo di ako có b jakieś ph threats. Con Gris is deciding the future of the Internet. The decisions that we're going to be making in the next two or three or four years are probably going to set our entire communication system in real-erentire society and of course that it won't be able to change for generations. At stake is the most promising breakthrough for democracy in our time. Today you have a situation where a blog can take on a cable news network or can compete for cable news networks customers based on quality, based on merit. That could change as big corporations battle to control the information superhighway. We don't start from the premise that automatically the government ought to get in and try to regulate. We got to wait and see if there's a problem first. Those mega-media companies are spending millions to get their way in Washington and across the country. As soon as we start talking fiber, telephone company started to allow it. Cable television company started to allow it.

But across the political spectrum, citizens are fighting back. Vote yes for fiber. I voting yes for fiber. The coalition that we have is over 700 groups and its economic and political and faith-based organizations all recognize that having a free and open internet is crucial. In this special report, the net at risk. Major funding is provided by Park Foundation, dedicated to heightening public awareness of critical issues. And by our sole corporate funder, Mutual of America, designing customized, individual, and group retirement products. That's why we're your retirement company. I'm Bill Moyers. Welcome to the Revolution, the internet revolution. It's changing our lives as we speak or click or delete or link. In just a decade, it's made sending and receiving information easier than ever. It's opened a vast new marketplace of ideas

and it's transforming commerce and culture. The internet is revolutionary because it is truly democratic, open to anyone with a computer and connection. We don't just watch, we participate, collaborate, and create. But this wide open access could be slipping through our fingers. The internet has become the foremost testing ground where the forces of innovation, corporate power, and government regulation converge. Already, its founding principle, the notion of a level playing field, or what's called network neutrality, is under siege by powerful industries trying to tilt the field to their advantage. It happened, remember, to television, radio, and cable. It could happen to the internet. But citizens are fighting back. Last spring, they flooded Congress with more than one million petitions with a single refrain, save our internet. That was the beginning of a movement that has kept the outcome in play. Here's our story, produced by Peter Bull

and reported by Rick Carr. It's not hype. The internet does have the power to change just about everything. It literally puts the world at your fingertips in your home. Revolutions like this one don't come along every day. The type of revolution that comes along maybe three times in our whole existence go back 60,000 years of birthal language. 5,000 years of birth of the alphabet and writing. 600 years ago, we saw the printing press and the internet is the complete combination of it. Never mind email in the web. The real revolution is the internet's power to let people do things that just a few years ago they couldn't have imagined. You want to see the world at your fingertips? Take a look at Provo Utah.

Where the internet lets student pilots use a sophisticated flight simulator at home. While the same internet lets an instructor miles away sit in the co-pilot seat. VR ready and rotate. And keep a close watch over the student. Literally. The instructor could even virtually hop into the aircraft that the student is flying and take over. If they weren't flying in an approach correctly, for example, which is just amazing that you could do something like that from 20 miles away. And if the technology is there, you could do it from 3,000, 4,000 or 20,000 miles away. Or what about this? Say you need a medical specialist, but there's not one within miles of where you live. Lyle, do you remember? No. I can remember. I couldn't get my left arm and stuff to work right. Do you feel normal on the left?

Yes. It doesn't feel funny or numbersingly. No. Dr. Elaine Scalibren is a stroke specialist at the University of Utah Hospital in Salt Lake City. She's using the internet to examine Lyle Crawford, who's with his wife, Janice, at a clinic that's about 150 miles away, more a three-hour drive. I see. Stroke is a very time-dependent disease. Basically, a blood clot blocks off the oxygen nutrient's going to the brain and the brain could die very quickly. So we don't have time to put somebody in a helicopter and fly them here or have their family member drive them to a closest specialist. And in most rural areas, there are very limited medical resources. You can see there's no dye going into the vessel and there's no vessel that goes up into the brain. This high-quality audio video link lets the doctor show them x-rays, zoom in on the patient, and even move the camera to look his wife in the eye. She makes you feel it like...

She's right here. She's right there. Yeah. She brings you right into her. She does make you feel distanced at all. It makes you feel more secure knowing you've got a specialist right there. Truly, we make the diagnosis by looking at the patient. Open and close the hand fast. Interviewing the patient, watching how they move, how they talk. That's sort of, you know, to be cliche. A picture's worth thousands of works, right? But most of us here in the US can't get an internet connection that's this good unless we're willing to pay around $350 a month. Compare that to the net service that's available in Tokyo, Reykjavik, Seoul, Slovenia, and elsewhere, where you can get an even more powerful connection for about a tenth as much money. You are listening to the heartbeat of the Sage Computing. The United States is the birthplace of the internet and the home of high tech, but we're no longer tops in the world

of high-speed online connections. In fact, the US has dropped below tenth place and compared to some other countries where pretty much crawling along the information superhighway. America's screwed. We basically are becoming technologically deficient. Telecom analyst Bruce Kushnick says that the only thing the US is doing quickly is falling behind. Right now what we have basically is sort of like, you know, still pictures. Versus what's really going to happen next, which is full-motion video everywhere. We're close to the dinosaurs compared to what these other countries are going to be developing in the next couple years. Kushnick says that's because telephone companies back in the 1990s promise that they'd hook us up to the information superhighway, but then renigged on that promise. The network that they promised to build. What could it do? Give us a sense of how they actually built this network. What could we have in our homes today? Video basically allows us to do, for example, high-level video conferencing.

Multi-video conferencing basically is the ability to have four or five or six people with large screens, not these small little things, but large screens sitting around, seeing each other. What we have now is these little screens on the TV, you know, on your computer that are about this big and everything is jerky. Everything would be smooth. Everything would look like as if we were in the middle of Star Trek. Someday people may want to see as well as talk over the telephone. What we are doing here is trying out one model of a picture phone, a new dimension in telephoning. The world's fares of the 1960s promised progress into space-age future, but we're still waiting. Okay, let's stop for a second to talk about what all of this means and why we should care. When we say that one internet connection is better than another one, what we're really talking about is speed. How much information, either of those connections, can handle per second? Let me illustrate. When most of us first went online, we used what's called a dial-up connection.

You'd hook a phone line up to your computer, which would dial a number, and then you'd wait while your computer connected slowly to the internet, and slow is the key word. Websites took ages to load, and if you could watch a video at all, it looked like this with a small picture, crude images, and jerky motion. Dial-up is slow, in part, because it relies on 19th century technology. Copper wire. The miracle of high-speed wire communication is commonplace today. Lift a telephone receiver, and the world is at your fingertips. It was cutting edge back when Samuel Morse and Alexander Graham Bell used it in the 1800s, but it can't keep up with the internet. At least it couldn't, until engineers figured out how to squeeze a lot more information through a copper wire without turning up your phone line. This is what's known as a broadband connection.

It's what most American homes that are online have right now from a cable television company or a phone company. It's 10 to 30 times faster than dial-up, so websites load a lot faster. The video images look a lot better, and you can do a lot more with one of these connections. But it's still limited by the 19th century technology of the telephone and telegraph. Copper wire. And so there are 96 fibres inside this tube. It's out of here, right? But glass is today's cutting edge technology. So this one strand right here has 12 fibres in it. 12 fibres in the area. Very tip there, right? Cyberoptic cables are long, thin strands of glass that transmit bursts of laser light and carry information faster than any copper wire. Right now I'm stripping the ends of the fibres. This is the actual glass, the fibres itself. These tiny glass fibres

are connecting homes around the world to the information superhighway. Around 40 times faster than the broadband most Americans get from their cable or phone company. So we're still in the slow lane of the internet revolution. I read somewhere that to download the library of Congress on a dollop modem would take 82 years. To download the library of Congress on fiber at a speed that's available today, not to the average consumer, but technologically as available today would take 45 seconds. All right, we're taking a checklist. We got a pilot test. Most Americans can't get high speed fiber connections like that. But at some schools, for instance, like the pilot training program at Utah Valley State College, you can experience internet speeds 10 to 20 times faster than what's available in most US homes. 100? 100? Zen, runway is in sight, runway inside.

If you had a connection like this, you could learn to fly, study a foreign language, tutor a child or mentor a student online. Fiber optic networks could revolutionize how we learn. They could also change our democracy for the better. For example, you could go online to participate in a town council meeting, not just listening and watching high quality video, but actually participating, joining in, asking questions, so that everybody who's actually at the meeting could see and hear you. In Asia and across Europe, governments and private firms have already started using fiber to connect homes to that information super highway. And the price is right. While most Americans pay around 40 bucks a month to connect over old-fashioned copper wire, which runs at about one megabit per second. In Korea and Japan, you can get 100 megabit services in both directions for about 40 bucks. That's 100 times as fast for the same price. The U.S. had a chance

to start building internet connections like that back in the early 1990s. It was actually, Al Gore may not have invented the internet, but he really was a prostitutizer for new fiber optic networks. That was 1992-93 time frame. And essentially, all the phone companies then basically said, we'll step up to the plate and we'll do this wiring plan. None of it ever happened. Kushnik and his colleague Tom Alabone are telecommunications muck rakers who call themselves teletruth. They're in the process of filing lawsuits against several regional phone companies. They alleged that the baby bells promised fiber optic connections nationwide but didn't deliver. By the year 2006, our research shows that 86 million households should have been wired with fiber. I.E., the majority of the United States. Had they just kept the eye on the ball and done this work, America would not be in the situation we are in today, which is inferior services for high costs. Why didn't the network get built? I mean, they made all these promises.

It sounded like it really was the information superhighway that we heard about in the 90s. Why didn't it get built? The reason why it didn't get built is because none of the regulars stepped up to the plate and held the phone companies accountable. Phone companies are regulated in part by the states. Kushnik and Alibone say that back in the 90s, the phone companies made an offer. They'd invest billions to build fiber optic networks if states let them take large tax deductions and raise the price of basic services. Call forward and call the right D cost about a penny to offer. They charged $5.30. All of that is profit now. Under the old regime, they would have to return all the extra money. They wouldn't be allowed to keep these profits. Under the old regulations, the phone companies were required to pour those profits back into their networks. In other words, to keep improving their infrastructure. Phone companies historically were regulated as a public utility. And the format or the type of accounting system that was utilized in the public utility industry

was something called rate of return. One of the reasons or ways to promote competition was to do away with rate of return regulations and give the phone companies the ability to make unlimited profits. That's really what it was all about. You asked people, did I ever pay for a fiber optic network thing? Oh, I don't know. And the answer is, well, you paid for it. You don't even remember it. And the regulators, even though it's on the books, a lot of the regulators, I hate to say this, but basically they're too close and cozy with the phone companies. The regulators he's talking about are state utility commissioners. They were supposed to make sure the phone companies kept their promise to connect millions of Americans to the information superhighway at 45 megabits per second. In New Jersey, for example, the phone company promised 5 million of those connections by last year. Right now, today, how many homes in New Jersey actually can get this kind of 45 megabit service? Well, actually zero. I mean, nobody can get 45 megabit.

It doesn't exist. I mean, it's actually zero. The only thing that comes close is in a commercial type of environment, you know, for very specialized types of applications. But there's no such thing in a residential consumer marketplace. According to TeleTruth, phone companies took 25 billion dollars in tax write-offs while revenues soared 128 percent. But they didn't build the fiber network they promised. So with all this cash cow what do you do with the money? They should have said, why don't we build the best network we can? And therefore, it'll basically the infrastructure and basically make our infrastructure the best in the world. And they didn't do that. They basically took the money and ran. When we began our reporting, my colleague's Peter Bull and Rick Carr wanted to call this story David versus Goliath. They were struck by the fact that after the phone companies failed to build the information superhighway they had promised, several towns and cities across the country

took matters into their own hands and decided to build their own fiber optic networks. That has landed almost every one of them in a David versus Goliath battle. As phone and cable giants pushed back determined to outlaw what they call unfair competition from municipalities. For our case study, Peter and Rick traveled to Lafayette, Louisiana, the heart of Cajun Country. We have an out migration problem with our young people from Louisiana. And I felt it was time for politicians to quit talking and do something. Something like building every home in business and town, its own fiber optic connection to the information superhighway. We see telecommunications in the way of internet, in the way of fiber connectivity as something that should be available to everyone. Just like water, sewer, electricity, telephone. I mean, it all falls into that same lump. I think this is a tremendous opportunity for small business. And to attract business here. Lafayette's phone company,

Bell South, and its cable company, Cox Communications, told residents that they'd have to wait a decade or longer for better internet connections. Like the ones they take for granted in Tokyo. Up until recently, the majority of the parish only had one-way communication on their cable. So they could download information. However, but to be able to send any information, they had to be able to connect through a phone modem. If we didn't do it, this community would not get it for 20 or 30 years. Who knows? And who is your name? Joey Dorel is the city parish president of Lafayette. He calls himself a progressive Republican, who sees no reason why local government shouldn't provide services that the private sector won't. You know, there are things that are going to be available three or four or five years from now that nobody is even thought about yet. And that's going to happen. And Lafayette will be uniquely positioned to take advantage of that unlike most of the country. So what the city decided to do was build its own

fiber network through its municipal power and water company, Lafayette Utility Systems or LUS. Terry Houvelle is the utilities director. A lot of people think of the internet as being sort of the triumph of the marketplace, the triumph of entrepreneurship. Why would a public utility need to get involved with the internet? The community wanted to have competitive options for telephone and mainly cable television servers. Cable television servers drove us even to the look of this because people were so dissatisfied with the cable TV company continually going up on their rates. When the city owned Utilities started to build its own small fiber network, looping around town to link up its generators, substations, and offices, Houvelle had an aha moment. That's what created the vision. I'm saying we can do something special for our community for the people that own this utility system. He realized that LUS could extend the network to every home in business in town and provide better internet service

at a lower price. If the city could raise 125 million dollars by selling bonds. We said, guys, come on. Some residents launched a grassroots campaign to support the community fiber plan. They called themselves Lafayette coming together, and they got together at a local restaurant to tell us about their unusual coalition. I repeat this tell that they are dying. Can't nobody else compete against corporate America but government. And when I saw the government willing to take a stand in regards to helping the people of this community, I said I'm getting on board this train. We have a mix in this room of Democrats and Republicans. I'm definitely on the conservative side. This is not a traditional place for conservatives or Republicans to be. Last time we were here, somebody made an analogy to roads and said, you know, we expect that the government is going to build roads because that's essential to commerce, and this is akin to that. That's another reason

I think conservatives have been able to come over to support this effort. It's infrastructure. And that's one of the things that we look to our government to provide. The big thing for us is realizing that the future of the world and communications is going to be big pipes, big bandwidth, big capacity, and that we were going to be left behind just like we would have been left behind with candles in 1896. It was in 1896 that Lafayette residents set a precedent for today's fight over fiber. The city had been passed over by private companies selling a cutting-edge energy source. Electricity. They had much bigger cities. They could go to like Baton Rouge and New Orleans at the time. So they passed us Well, our community decided that we wanted electricity. That's when LUS, the Lafayette utility systems was formed. And so we had a good message. If we don't do it, we don't get it. Until the city of Lafayette decided to do it, Bells South and Cox were in no hurry to improve internet

service. But as soon as there was a threat of some competition from the city, they jumped into action at the state capital. As soon as we started talking fiber, as soon as we started laying out in a public way that we were thinking about doing this telephone company started Delabi. Cable television company started Delabi. Cox and Bells South had plenty of clout in Baton Rouge and they used it to try to kill Lafayette's fiber plan. They argued that it represented unfair competition. They wouldn't speak to us. One of the criticisms that opponents of municipal networks make is that LUS doesn't pay taxes so you have an unfair competitive advantage over four profit companies. Pure bunk. Pure bunk. And they know it. Currently, we're paying some work over 10% of our growth revenues and in lieu of taxes. That's greater. That's about 17 million dollars. That is greater than by tenfold. Well, the telecommunications companies are paying a life.

We're actually paying a higher burden. Vote yes for fiber. I'm voting yes for fiber. Vote Vote Vote yes for fiber. The city and the communications giants agreed to put it to a vote. Lafayette residents would decide whether the city could issue 125 million dollars in bonds to pay for the fiber network. Without the deep pockets of the phone and cable giants, Lafayette coming together put together an inexpensive and inventive campaign. It included something called the fiber film festival. Short, home-made videos distributed over the internet. It's a boils down and it's this working fast machine right here, which you don't really want. Oh, it's really nice. It's like an old shoe type thing right here. Hey, it's a deal in a century to me. What do you think Lafayette? Sorry, Sam. Lafayette is not interested. It was what's

known as a viral internet campaign. Not a virus that infects a computer, but something that's funny and compelling that people spread from computer to computer. Wake up. Let's smell the coffee. You're getting snowballed. Cox and Bell South are spreading disinformation in an effort to rob you of your opportunity to have a superior, high-speed fiber optic television, internet and phone connection direct to your home. And your chance to pay 20% less. We can rise above that, Lafayette. On July 16th, you can vote 5% to the home. Vote yes for the future. Vote yes for 5% for Lafayette. Vote yes to the 16th for 5%. People all over the world were looking at this 5% film festival. Just laughing about this and just thrilled with it. And I'd get emails from people saying, don't let them stop you. Don't let them slow you down. Take a pause and say for this moment, you have been part of making history. That's right. On election day,

the people of Lafayette enthusiastically agreed to build their own fiber network. 62% voted to let the city borrow the money and start construction. And the reason we got the vote, during the campaign, was price and pride. People are going to save money. And people are proud in this community. And they're proud of being a progressive community. And so, I think that's what won the vote for us. The phone company wasn't about to roll over, though. Bell's how filed suit against the plan, once again claiming unfair competition. The court battle has delayed construction by more than a year and cost the city more than $125,000 in legal fees. What they've been effective at in the past, to create fear, is to stretch out the time it takes for any fiber optics to get actually online. So that they can say, well, look, they're not meeting their expectations. Their business model has failed.

Despite the victory at the polls, the legal battle drags on. The city of Lafayette has had to ask Louisiana's highest court for permission to finally connect residents to the fiber optic fast lane. It's not told my community. To them, we're nothing but a chocolate chip and their jaw of chocolate chip cookies. You know, but the last thing they wanted to see was a community the size of Lafayette held up as a success. A few other communities across the country have also taken on the phone and cable companies. And Lafayette succeeded in building municipal networks. But it's an itch the two industries are trying to keep from spreading. They spend around $40 million a year on lobbying in state capitals. And so far, they have convinced legislatures in 14 states to make it more difficult or impossible for communities to build their own networks. We're talking here of a powerful duopoly, less David versus Goliath than one giant against another. That's because in more than 90% of American homes, phone

and cable companies are the only two potential sources of internet service. The cable company's only competition is the phone company and vice versa. To slice off business from their cable rival, the phone companies now say they're going to build a new network of internet service that will be even better than the one they promised in the 90s but never produced. Once again, though, they want something in return. They won't control. Not just over the copper wires and fiber-optic cables, but control over the internet itself. Information Super Highway is a good name for the internet because it really is like a road. When you send an email, for instance, your computer wraps it in a kind of digital envelope then sends it online. That's it there on the on-ramp. Once it's on the road, it's the same as any other information. Say, a video conference between lawyers or a song on its way to an iPod. The net doesn't

care why it's there or what's inside. Telephone companies say the highways get encrowded with box trucks carrying internet phone calls and 18 wheelers full of video and that it's needed for information gridlock. You have to have a vision of the future that includes all of the data that's going to be streaming into the home in the form of videos coming in, you know, services that we can't even imagine yet. That's Mike McCurry. A few years ago, he was press secretary in the Clinton White House. Now he's working as a lobbyist for the industry that wants to kill net neutrality. His clients, giant phone and technology firms, want to turn the information superhighway into a toll road. What we're really talking about is the same old dumb pipe that we have today that is sooner or later going to get clogged with too much traffic or a smart, more efficient and faster network that manages traffic

that treats video information differently from voice information and differently from text information so that you actually are using technology to manage the way that information flows inside the network. McCurry's clients want to manage the traffic by building toll boots on the highway because they failed to deliver the fiber networks they promised in the 90s. Networks that could have handled the extra traffic like video downloads. They, in effect, want to operate a superhighway but then build a separate premium lane next to it that they're going to providers for it. And then spread the costs throughout all these big users. So if big users like Google and Yahoo pay the toll, they'll be able to speed information down the fast lanes. If not, they'll be stuck in the slow lanes along with everyone else who couldn't pay the fees. The phone companies have been making their case for dividing the highway in Congress. Sure you might have different speeds but let's use

the analogy of what happens here on the East Coast. People go from Washington to New York on Amprak. They can pay a little more and take the which is pretty fast but it runs on time. They can pay a little bit less and take the local speeds for internet connection will only continue to get better. And for those that invest in this new infrastructure and it's not cheap. They ought to have a right to say, hey, if you want to pay a little bit more, you might get a little better degree of service. That's all Macarie says his clients want. We charge 18 wheelers of higher tax because of the extra load that they put on the road. But that didn't affect what we're talking about here. An additional charge by these super-huge users of the internet and allow them, you know, ask them to spread the costs of building some of this network out among their customers. But huge users

of the internet, like Google Yahoo and eBay, for instance, they pay millions a month for net access. Skeptics say the phone companies are really up to something else entirely. It's just the bell companies want the opportunity to charge twice. They want to charge for Google to connect the network at all. And then they want to charge another price to reach their consumers. Timothy Wu teaches technology law at Columbia University. Companies can do two things. They can either offer more value or they can try and extract cash from the companies because they are in a position that's threatened them. The first helps the economy. The second is just extortion. It's the Tony soprano system. You know, it's like a protection racket. And it's not an economically productive activity to toll booth companies because you happen to have the power over the gateway to do so. Wu says the phone companies plan would strike down the most important rule of the

internet in place from day one. The speed limit is the same for everyone. And you can go just as fast as anyone else. But not under the phone companies plan. Let's say Verizon is running the internet toll booth in your neighborhood and Yahoo and Google are lined up to pay. Verizon could decide to charge Yahoo a low toll for access to the fast lane, but demand a prohibitively high fee from Google, relegating it to the slow lane. So Yahoo's search engine would come up on your computer almost instantly while Google's wouldn't. That kind of discrimination is a lot like something that happened in the 19th century in an earlier round of the media revolution. Right on a telegraph, blank. And your words appear by modern magic on paper thousands of miles away. In those days, Western Union had a monopoly over telegraph wires. The company gave the associated press a big break on fees, but charged other news organizations

a lot more to keep them off the wires. And they use that monopoly. They use it to favor political parties they liked. They use it to favor political candidates they wanted to destroy. So how did that instance of discrimination get broken? Eventually, the government intervened with something called Common Carriage. That is, they said the telegraph is no different than an innkeeper, no different than a port, no different than a train. Everybody's equally. So this idea of Common Carriage, the idea is that as long as I can pay, you have to take my business. Correct. That's the idea. You have to pay, and then we don't discriminate as who you are. And government, since the 16th century, have felt that certain parts of the economy, ports, canals, roads, trains, innkeepers have to deal with all customers equally, but that's important for the health of the country. And I think we have the same situation that the ports and canals of the 18th century are the internet

in the 21st century. And that's why we need to relearn those lessons. Remember, Common Carriage means the network doesn't discriminate. The internet version of Common Carriage is known as network neutrality. That means the internet is neutral in the same way the grid that supplies electricity is neutral. It doesn't discriminate between things you might plug into it. Electricity is one of our most faithful service. It gives us light. It starts our cars. It cooks. And refrigerates our food. These represent fuels of the innumerable applications of electricity. You have the grid, and it makes a lot of things possible. You can plug a lot of things into it, and we're not stuck at the first generation of vacuum cleaners. The vacuum cleaners now are better than they were 40 years ago. And one of the reasons is because the electric network, the current

that comes out, is neutral. It has no opinion as to whether Samsung or General Electric makes a better device. It just gives electricity, and whoever wants to can design a product to those specifications. And the same thing is true with the internet. It's maybe the easiest way to understand it. There's two sides. There's the market for the appliances. That's Google, and that's Yahoo! And then there's the companies that supply the wires. The electricity. But without neutrality, Woo says, internet companies and websites that couldn't afford the toll for the fast lane would be at a huge disadvantage. Because it might take so long for them to load on to your computer that you'd give up, and go to sites that could afford the toll. The thing about the internet is we don't always know what's going to come next. Who would have predicted blogs? Who would have predicted that YouTube would take off? predicted that Google would be the dominant search engine 10 years ago? Nobody knew. And one of the reasons that all these things keep showing up is because the whole world has the chance to show up and try and create a new application.

Those new ideas were possible because until recently the federal government played traffic cop and enforced net neutrality rules. It is basic government regulation that allows access to this common infrastructure that is critical to the original birthday of the internet and to the ongoing operation of the internet. Earl Comstock represents companies that depend on equal access to the internet. For example, a company called Vonage that lets you make phone calls over your internet connection. So my companies would be hurt because without that right to interconnect, we're unable to provide service to customers, and that then diminishes competition, which means higher consumer prices, less innovation, and fewer choices. Other advocates of neutrality say it protects free speech. Because without it, phone and cable companies could censor internet traffic they don't like. It happens that a lot of the IT industry isn't terribly enthusiastic about the second amendment. Larry Pratt

is director of gun owners of America. We want the Brady campaign and gun owners of America to have the same fair use of the internet highway, and we don't want speed bumps that are allowed by government to be placed on one side of the other. So if we want to buy 100 units of internet, broadband, capability, that should be the same price to us as somebody else. And that way, we're guaranteed that if our supporters support us enough, we're going to be able to get our message out regardless of what the big boys may or may not like. Those big boys in the cable and phone industries spent years fighting net neutrality. They said the law was ambiguous and archaic because it was drawn up for the old world of copper wire before broadband. In 2002, the Federal Communications Commission decided that neutrality didn't apply to cable internet. And in the summer of 2005, the FCC off the hook too. Suddenly,

there were no more net neutrality rules. The FCC replaced them with suggested principles for an open internet. A principle is never enough. You need to have rules and you have to have enforceability. This is the opportunity to vote, to keep the internet the way it is. In Congress, Democrat Ed Markey led a movement to pass a law that would restore the rules of net neutrality. Net neutrality was the rule until August of 2005. Since August of 2005, telephone company executives have been saying, there are pipes. We built those pipes. We have a right to create the rules for those pipes. We have a right to charge whomever whatever we want. Those are the new rules. The rules of monopolists. The rules of duopolists. We have to go back to the rules which created the internet

and served it very well until August of 2005. We are not going to go back. Republican Fred Upton says the rules just aren't necessary. A lot of us believe that we don't have a problem today, and we're not going to regulate overly-regulate a product. When, in fact, we don't have a problem which might stifle the entrepreneurship and the progress that we want to make in the future. But advocates of neutrality wonder whose entrepreneurship, whose progress, the phone and cable companies, or the hundreds of thousands of online bloggers, activists, advocates, artists, and journalists who were thriving under the old rules. Today you have a situation where a blog can take on a cable news network, or can compete for cable news networks customers based on quality, based on merit. If people like Instapundent, better than they like CNN, or they like the commentary and daily costs better than

Fox, they can go there. And they're about equal. I mean, they have more money, but they're about equal. And often you find out that a successful blogger will have more customers and more people watching than CNN's crossfire. This is because the network isn't discriminating, isn't picking favorites. And a network that picks favorites where one is faster, where the other is blocked, or harder to reach. That favor is the entities that are established differently, changes the entire information environment. It sounds like what you're saying is that we'll have sort of the same media that we had in the pre-internet age, in other words, a forum. I think that's right. I think we'll go back to ways of things have always been, which is to say a couple entities with the resources to do so, we'll have more access to consumers. Big media companies, like the ones that have consolidated control over the rest of the media, like radio, TV, publishing, where fewer and fewer companies own more

and more. Television, for example, where just six companies control all four of the big networks and the majority of the channels on most cable systems. In a very real way, the antidote to the consolidation in the traditional media was the emergence of the internet as a place where people could break through those barriers, that consolidation, and gain access to the information, the products, the services, the ideas, that they wanted to have in their lives. That's why of the internet was that it made the First Amendment a living document again for millions of Americans for whom it had lost its meaning. The First Amendment had become with AJ Liebling, famously said, the freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. Well, this basically of the press belong to everyone again. The fact that it is truly an open environment where the costs are so low, people have a chance and say something media scholar and reform activist Robert McChesney and his allies in the fight for net neutrality,

say this openness is so valuable to democracy that we can't afford to let it change. The decisions that we're going to be making in the next two or three or four years are probably going to set our entire communication system and really our entire society on a course that it won't be able to change for generations. It will set institutions and rules in place that we're going to build on. Advocates of neutrality worry that the new rules for the internet are being written by companies that are interested mainly in controlling the cable TV business, which is worth about $100 billion a year. That's because increasingly all television, as well as phone services, will be coming by way of your computer. There's a new world of technology and choice in communications. At last summer, the telecom industry spent millions of dollars on ad campaigns aimed mainly at members of Congress. The telephone and cable companies were battling for new legislation that would lock in their control

of TV services offered over the internet. As soon as Congress updates our telecom goals. These are companies that without exception are all based on getting government monopoly licenses. Government monopoly franchises for telephone service or cable service in their communities. They're most important work. They're victory in the marketplace isn't with consumers. The marketplace has been in Washington or it's in state capitals or it's in city hall, giving politicians to give them these monopoly licenses. Cable and phone companies spend millions to get that message across. The cable industries trade group and top firms, for example, spend around twelve million dollars a year to lobby DC lawmakers. And to give their campaigns about five million per election. Among phone companies, AT&T is the nation's second largest campaign donor. And every year, Verizon spends nearly as much on lobbying as the whole cable industry. One report estimated that this year, the two industries have been spending 1.5 million dollars

a week to influence Washington. The unfinished business is the request for a recorded vote on amendment number seven printed in House Report 109-491 offered by the gentleman from Massachusetts Mr. Markey. In June, that strategy paid off. Even though advocates have net neutrality say it's the first amendment of the Internet, the House of Representatives refused to reinstate it. The amendment is not agreed to. Those advocates say that if the Senate goes along, it would be one more victory for big media conglomerates. Like what happened with the Telecom Act of 1996, when the Republican Congress and President Clinton gave big media companies the power to get even bigger, to own more and more TV and radio stations. Very powerful lobbies, phone companies, media companies, cable companies, computer companies, reducing it out basically to make sure the rules were changed to benefit them. There was a clear understanding then,

as there is now that the government was going to set the rules. There was no such thing as deregulation. The deregulation is a misnomer then as it is now. In other words, McChesney says deregulation means government and industry cooperated against the rules. After the House voted against net neutrality, a bipartisan group mounted an effort to fight for it in the Senate. Every day, as more and more citizens learn about the issue of net neutrality, they realize that the internet, as they know it, is very much at risk. The idea that brings us together is a free and unfettered internet for the 21st century. We are here. Republican Olympia Snow came together with the Republican Propriet by Randorgan to argue for restoring net work neutrality. Their plan won support from an eclectic coalition of citizens. The coalition that we have is over 700 groups. So, there's a huge

breath in its economic and political and safe-based recognize that having a free and open internet is Cảm ơn người. John Blades is a co-founder of Liberal Group move on, and Michelle Combs is director of communications for the Christian coalition. Our organizations, even though we may not agree on a lot, we are very similar that we are, you know, we try to get our supporters out on an issue, we try to activate people. And with net neutrality, we're allowed to do that. Without it, we would not be able to. Last year there was a bill on the floor, and we realized that it was about to become passed, where there were some amendments attached to the bill. And we didn't agree with it, and we did an action alert. And within an hour, congressmen were actually changing their votes, because they were receiving phone calls and emails from our supporters. So if we didn't have the access of the internet, we couldn't have sent out our action alert. The public square has been shrinking in the real world in the last couple decades. You don't have the town square. The mall is your new town square, and the mall is privately owned.

You go in there with the political voice, and you can be sent away. Where do you go? The internet has been this bright spot, where there's been this vibrant growth, citizen participation. If net neutrality doesn't become law, future move-ons wouldn't happen. Move-on happened seven and a half years ago, a mom and pop shop essentially. We spent $89 and put up a website, and we had equal access to people as anyone else, and it just grew to a half a million people. That won't be able to happen if the internet has a slow lane and a fast lane. And that's what that risk. Mike McCurry says not to worry. We don't start from the premise that automatically the government ought to get in and try to regulate. We got to wait and see if there's a problem first. They can't, you know, ask move-on and Christian coalition. Do you have any problem sending your stuff out today? The answer is no.

They're just worried about a hypothetical problem that has not yet arisen. Now, what representatives of the telephone and cable companies say is, we would never block anything. Do you trust them when they say that? Well, if that's really how they feel, then that's what they should put into the law. That's what the FCC should come out and say. If that's really how they feel. Net neutrality fared better in the Senate, where the Commerce Committee vote on Snow and Oregon's bill was a tie, leaving the fate of the internet up for grabs. Net neutrality advocates say, without a law, they don't have much faith that phone and cable firms will keep their word. And they worry that government watch dogs will turn into corporate lapdogs. Now, the phone company said, you can trust us. We're just out to make money. We're not going to interfere with anyone's political speech. But, you know, the government says that too, we don't trust them. You know, you just don't give people that power. If you don't have to, we don't have to. We turn now for some conversation with a man whose work has helped define this debate.

Mark Cooper is director of research at the Consumer Federation of America and the fellow at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society. He's been called over 250 times to provide expert testimony to courts, legislatures and regulatory agencies, yet still has found time to write or edit several books, including this one, Media Ownership and Democracy and the Digital Information Age, and this one, cable merges and monopolies, market power in digital media and communications networks. Thanks for being here. In the interest of full disclosure, you're not a neutral observer in this story. The Consumer Federation is part of the save the internet coalition fighting for net neutrality, right? Absolutely. So, what's your dog in this? Well, we firmly believe that the principle of non-discriminatory access to communications, open communications network, is vital to our economy and our democracy. So, it's not just democracy, it's capitalism you're talking about. Oh, absolutely. If you look back over the history of capitalism, the principle of non-discrimination, sometimes called common carriage, has been with us from the beginning. I'd like to say it's part of the DNA of capitalism, because in the capitalist system, the movement of goods and services is vital to economic activity.

And the movement of ideas is vital to democracy, and those two go hand in hand. It's not quite David versus Goliath. You've got Yahoo, and Microsoft, and eBay on your side. I mean, I noticed that the head of eBay sent an email to millions of customers, are learning them to the dangers of the two tier network. Well, their journey come lately, frankly. I mean, we were doing this five or six years before they arrived, but they've discovered that if you give the power of gatekeeping to the owners of the wires, just like way back a hundred years ago, the owners of the railroads had the power of gatekeeping, it really does undermine our dynamic economy. But let me step over to your opponent's side for a moment. They say the very idea of network neutrality is really a quote, cynical ruse, a ploy by some well-heeled internet companies to lock in their market share with the government's help and shift all the cost of transmitting this heavy content entirely to the consumer. The answer is that when I pay for the network, when I buy service, the one fundamental principle has been is that I decide what I can have.

The recent guys who come along and say, they want to charge Google or eBay for using the network. They already pay a little bit to connect up to it. But I'm the guy who is actually using the network when the consumer, when I go out to Google site and I say, hey, click this. Who's using that network? I'm the one who's decided what the download. And I paid for the service. And if they want to set up a category for really high speed stuff and say, Cooper, you have to pay a little bit more for this in order to get the high speed stuff, that's fine with me. And we actually have that already. They mislead you about that. That system already exists. Some people have dial-ups, some people have DSL, some people can get a T1 line, they call it. But the key thing is that once I pay for that service, they don't get the opportunity to say, Google's stuff goes, but eBay's doesn't. And that's exactly what they want. The telephone companies in particular, Mark, say that the fees they want will be used to build more capacity.

Here's what the head of AT&T Toe Congress, quote, you cannot expect any company. My company or anyone else's to pour in these billions of dollars that are required to build infrastructure without some return. And they've been recouping the cost by charging the customer. That's the key thing is that I will pay a fair price for their network as long as I get to determine what services I can access. They want to change that. They want to charge me for part of the network. And then they want to go out to Google or eBay and say, look, I'll make a special deal with you. I'll let your bits go in this fast lane. But you know what? I'll give you an exclusive deal on that fast lane. And they won't let other people compete for the fast lane. So they become a gatekeeper. Now they get to decide who's going to succeed. Because let's be clear, if one guy has access to the consumer at a high speed rate and his competitor does not, eventually the competitors will disappear. And so what they're doing is strangling competition at the level of applications like Google or content. And in exchange for building the pipes, that's a bad deal.

Congress left town last month without settling the issue. What's the next round in this fight? Congress left town without settling, but they didn't pass a lot of money bills either. So they went home to try and get reelected. And now they're threatening to come back in a lame duck session, in which one suspects that a bunch of them might not even be coming back. So it's going to be a really lame, lame duck. But these lame duck sessions are really dangerous. Because what happens is I have to pass a few money bills. And what people will now say is, look, you've got something in this money bill. You're money or your principles. Well, you stand up for network neutrality. And so we're concerned that in that kind of horse trading, principles tend to get compromised away. And the chairman of the committee in the Senate, Senator Stevens, has said he's going to bring this up at lame duck. He's looking for the votes he needs to break any filibuster. And so the next few weeks is really important for those million people who are vigilant and stood up in the spring to keep an eye out.

Because we don't want a lame duck session to kill this most important principle of our society. What makes you think people really care about this? Ordinary people. This is not just an arcane telephone kind of issue. You know, when you talk about universal service, people will get lost in that. People really do have a good instinct about the openness of our information system, right? And they really are concerned about media concentration. They're really concerned about telephone companies and cable companies which control the flow of programming into their houses. There's a rebellion about cables control of those 500 channels. And so they really do care about it. And you don't need a lot of technical expertise to understand. This is a choice between who gets decide what information you have access to, will there be a gatekeeper, will there be a tall booth, or will there be a free flow of information? But doesn't this come down to a wrestling match among some big guys? I mean, you're on the one side, the telephone and the cable companies that want to charge internet companies extra for higher speed access.

On the other hand, giants like Yahoo and Google and Microsoft that want to outlaw those fees by mandating net neutrality. Isn't it going to be decided by which side gives the most money to come? Well, it's, you know, the interesting thing is those big guys you talk about were little guys a few years ago. And that's the important point. Let me give you a historical example. When the internet first was rolling out to the public, the big guys didn't want to give away email. They wanted to charge for email as a separate service. The little guys at the time, the little internet service providers, there were 8,000 of them at one point were down to 2000 now because they've been strangled by the network on us. The little guys said, hey, no, we're going to bundle in email. So we don't know who the little guys are and we really have to worry about the little guys. Google, they may be a big company now. Who knows where the next big companies coming from. And we know that in the internet age, the big companies actually do have a real chance to start as little companies. But if you let the telephone companies and the cable companies set up this scheme where they're going to charge more to some people than others, you know who won't be able to pay the freight? The little guys. And we'll be killing the future of innovation.

And so it's not just the big guys versus the little guys. For us, it's making sure that the little guys have a chance. It's not big guys versus big guys. When all is said and done, isn't this going the way that television went and radio went and cable went with big commercial interest deciding what is in the public interest? Well, they have clearly lost control of speech on the internet, which is very, very different. If you look out at the internet, one estimate is that 60% of the content on the internet is produced by people, not corporations. You look at commercial TV, zero. Radio, 5% talk radio. Newspapers, occasional op-ed maybe, order a letter to the editor. 99% of the content in those three traditional media are from corporations. The internet has turned that on its head. But it's not necessarily commercial. That's the important point. It's not clear what the commercial activity will be other than selling eyeballs.

But it's democracy. And it's conversation. There's a conversation between people worldwide on the internet that did not exist 10 years ago. And how can you take that away? Isn't there so much competition out there for news and information now that nobody can control it? Well, if your video clips don't work or your video clips can't reach lots of people, you will then be at a disadvantage. So they have put their thumb on that scale of democracy by discriminating against some people against other people, by giving their own services a better opportunity. And that will, in fact, undermine, slow down this democracy, this wonderful cacophony of voices we have. But all those voices are today equal in their opportunity to reach equal in their opportunity to ship stuff around. If you put these toe booths on, that equality of opportunity goes away. And it matters in the long run.

So how does this issue of net neutrality fit into the big issue we've all been concerned about, of media conglomeration? Well, I mean, let's separate the two aspects of the internet space. One is this non-commercial space, this public sphere, which has this roaring conversation among people, thousands and thousands of bloggers. We need to keep that as open as we possibly can. On the commercial side, it's not clear. I mean, if you think about the old world, the expression was, in a world of limited shelf space, placement was everything, right? If you needed to get in prime time, you need to placement is critical. In a world of infinite opportunity, it turns out placement is awfully important and maybe everything is well. Why? Because how are they going to find you? And so what we now have is we have the dominant companies who show their prime time shows, which get, you know, 6-10 million viewers on Sunday night. On Monday morning, they're available on their website. People know where to go for those clips, right? To watch those shows. And they're selling advertising again on those websites. So how the internet will change the commercial space? It's not clear. That is, it remains to be seen if people will come with business models that will break the whole.

We heard in our report, Professor Timothy Wu referred to the Tony soprano rules of capitalism. If you look at the issue, I think it's more the rubber barren model of business. If you go back and look at what the railroads try to do, the railroads said, hey, we want to be shippers too. We don't want to just provide moving cars. They began to discriminate. They would charge one shipper more than another shipper for the same product over the same distance. Why? Because they had an ownership interest in shipper A and they didn't in shipper B. Towns were getting strangled by this discrimination. Rockefeller was putting all of his competition in the oil business. And so this was a model of the rubber barrens of the late 19th century. And our society, unlike many other capital societies, said, no, we're not going to have it. We passed the anti-trust laws to break up the trust. And we passed the interstate commerce act to say common carriage. These systems are so important to the flow of goods and in the case of information democracy that they have to be operated on a non discriminatory basis. The fundamental principle that in the information age, if you think about how ironic it is, we now have the merging of communications and commerce of speech and commercial activity.

And now when the need for open non discriminatory networks is more important than ever, we're doing about face and abandon what was a fundamental and very, very productive principle for us. See, full by fellow Stanford University consumer, the heart of Americans has said, you're no radical, right? On this? No, I am a devout capitalist, but I firmly believe that there are some principles. And if you look back at our history, it was the reaffirmation of the commitment to an open society and an open real competition. You know, we said we're not going to let these cartels dominate our society. So sometimes you need government to think of good ideas to impose principles and restraint on the capitalist sector. In our economy, and you had it in your piece, 80% of the telephone service and electricity service in America is provided by private companies subject to public obligations. That's our model. It's a darn good model.

Mark Cooper, Consumer Federation of America, thank you very much. Thank you for having me. As you just heard, the heart of this debate is whether the concentration of media ownership serves democracy, diversity, and the First Amendment. More is at stake than the Internet. Even as we speak, the Federal Communications Commission is thinking of changing the rules to allow a single corporation to own in one market, the major daily newspaper, as well as up to eight radio stations and three television stations. And with the coming of digital broadcasting that enables one station to broadcast several signals, it's conceivable that a dozen or more television channels in one city could be controlled by one company. Two weeks ago in Los Angeles, the FCC held the first of several public hearings on these proposed changes. Thank you for being here. It's an exercise in tightening our democracy.

I look forward to the testimonies of the witnesses and the public comments we're here to see, so thank you so much. The big turnout included many folks from LA's Creative Community who said that media conglomeration is stifling local coverage of the news and the diversity of opinion and voices. Let's listen to a medley of citizens who attended the hearings as captured by the PBS team at now. How do you expect these corporations to give us a diversity of opinion if they can't even give the marketplace a diversity of programs? There's no public benefit to allowing them to have more stations. They will drive me out of business. I want to stay in business and serve the public. The airwaves belong to the American people and we believe it's time for them to take it back. We must ask the question, is American radio better today than it was 10 years ago? That was the answer. Media consolidation has, without question, harmed localism in radio.

You have the keys to communication in your hands. You are responsible for whether we hear what's going on in this country right now. One of the people at that hearing in Los Angeles is with me now. Eric Kleinenberg is a scholar at New York University and the author of Fighting for Air, the battle to control America's media to be published in January. Welcome. Thanks for having me. Why the title Fighting for Air? Well, there is a kind of war going on around the United States today. It's a battle of citizens who are fed up with what's happened to their local media, their radio stations, their television, their newspapers, and their battling to assert control. Ten years ago, the FCC in Congress relaxed the ownership rules, allowed a small number of companies to own more and more media outlets than ever before. And I think most people know what's happened to their media by listening to the radio or not. It used to be the case that no radio company could own more than 2 a.m. and FM stations in any one market today, they own up to 8 and are trying to get 10 or 12. What's happened is that they turn those radio stations from valuable local community assets places where you could go to get local news, reporting about your institutions, your local music into places that played pre-programmed content.

And the result is that people turn the stations off. Everywhere I travel, people say we've lost our local radio station. There's no local news here. There's not even any local personalities on anymore. But when the internet appeared almost out of nowhere a dozen years ago, people said, oh well, the internet will solve the problem of the posity or lack of information from radio and local television. Has the internet done that? The internet is an incredible medium and it's about to become even more powerful, more incredible because radio, television, newspapers, movies, all of these things will be available to Americans through the internet. Unfortunately, what the internet has not added is local content. The internet gives us a world of information about the world. You can get British and French, newspapers like never before. But your viewers should ask themselves, how much local radio is actually available? How much local broadcast content? How much local reporting that's not already available in other outlets comes through the internet?

And the answer is incredibly little. It's just not the solution for the problem of local media. I want to show you a report that really drives home what you're saying. This was prepared after Katrina by Peter Bull and Rick Carr, my colleagues who produced the piece on the internet. It comes to us from the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Let's look at it. Local media can mean the difference between life and death. Take the example of Hancock County, Mississippi on the Gulf Coast. It's two local commercial radio stations went off the air after consolidation changed the rules of the radio business. A local volunteer launched a community FM station, the only broadcaster in the county, and then Hurricane Katrina hit. This is WQRZLP, 103.5 FM. Stay tuned for a public bulletin from the Hancock County Emergency Management Agency. Hancock County has suffered extreme devastation and damages assessments have sheltered.

He's available at bay high. He has closed their distribution sites for food, water, and ice. Open from 8 a.m. to Sydney. Hancock County has established a family assistance center. Hancock County is under a mandatory curfew. Radio works because in an emergency such as Katrina, people didn't have power. They didn't have portable televisions. Television could not do the job. Radio almost everyone has a car radio that works. It was here 60 miles east of New Orleans that the most intense part of Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005. Winds reached 125 miles per hour, and water from the Gulf searched miles inland. The number one goal was to make sure that it doesn't matter what programming you run. We're just waiting for the emergency.

This is one of 3.5 FM, the voice of Bay St. Louis Wavering. Bryce Phillips is chief engineer, general manager, and pretty much everything else for WQRZ, a non-profit low power FM community radio station that serves the small towns along the Hancock County coast. That's what this station is designed to do. It was to be 24-7, and we were going to build it to where it was survivable by any natural disaster, especially hurricane. The water got to the point where it was up above our heads where we're standing right now, right? We always halfway up that roof. Thanks to Bryce Phillips, WQRZ managed to stay on the air throughout Katrina and its aftermath, when most of the commercial radio stations in the path of the storm went silent. I didn't know that all the rest of those stations were out. I had no clue. I think I'm one of a thousand, but I'm just serving my own community. I had no clue that I was 104 out of 41 that survived. Out of 41 radio stations. Total.

On the Gulf Coast. Yes. And into New Orleans. So 90% of the stations went off the air. That's granted to stay on at ground zero. Do you think the WQRZ saved lives during the storm? I think so. Absolutely. Brian Adam, who just about everybody calls by his nickname Hoody, directs Hancock County's Emergency Operations Center. Just him putting out our evacuation orders and staying on the air 24 hours would no sleep. Him constantly saying, folks, this is going to be bad. The weather service is saying it's going to be bad. The National Hurricane Center said it's going to be bad. Y'all need to please leave. Small radio stations like WQRZ are important to their communities because they can focus on the specific needs and issues in those communities. If you look at radio, it's extraordinarily inexpensive compared to other media compared to television. It's ideally suited for local ownership. It doesn't take a lot of capital. It's almost cheaper than doing a website, in fact. And if you get right down to it, the cost are that low. And it's accessible to anyone that's got a radio, which basically means it's ubiquitous.

But big media companies have caused hundreds of small local stations to lose touch with their communities. In 1996, broadcasting conglomerates lobbied legislators to remove the limit on the number of radio stations one firm could own. Congress passed the law, and President Bill Clinton signed it. Almost immediately after that clear channel, Infinity Radio, the biggest media companies in radio that were maxed out then with 40 stations or close to it, went on a buying binge and buying up station after station after station in a two-year race to gobble up as many stations as humanly possible. And by the end of the sort of day loose, three years later, you had a company like Clear Channel with 1200 radio stations, 1200 radio stations. The new mega media chains fired local staff and piped in syndicated shows. As the ownership has become increasingly concentrated, what we're seeing is that local coverage basically is being stripped out everywhere. Local journalism, local newsrooms, community media basically doesn't make a lot of profits for these firms syndicated stuff does.

So in community after community, we're seeing this hardly any coverage of public life. That wave of mergers alarmed the FCC. In an effort to bring local radio back to communities that had lost it, the commission started licensing hundreds of new local low power FM radio stations. WQRZ is one of a few hundred nationwide, mostly in small towns and rural areas. Low power FM is an extraordinary story in a number of ways. It said basically for a few hundred dollars, you can put out a pretty good signal that will cover a city or half of a major city in all of a small town at low power. Well, it was despised, obviously, by the commercial broadcasters. The last thing they needed was a lot of new options in the dial that were local people doing stuff locally without ads on the air. If big media had had its way, none of the new stations would have gone on the air. The National Association of Broadcasters pressured the FCC to abandon the program, arguing that the new stations would cause interference.

The commission refused. Its engineering staff said there were no grounds for concern. So the NAB went to Congress, along with National Public Radio, which also worried about interference. They convinced lawmakers to cut the program by one half. Bryce Phillips was one of the few to win one of the new licenses. He says WQRZ proves that it doesn't take much money to get a radio station on the air. He lives on social security checks he receives for a medical disability. Yet before the storm, he built a transmitter shack and a hundred foot tower himself and turned a bedroom of his house into a broadcast studio. The shack and tower weathered the storm. The house didn't. The house basically pulled up from the floor joist and just floated to the right and set back down to foot. Things were just gone. Just completely gone.

Sarah Allen is a radio engineering consultant who came to Hancock County as a volunteer about a week after the storm to help upgrade WQRZ's signal so that it could reach more of the devastated county. The radio station tower did survive and that was the efforts of Bryce Phillips in the foresight he had in the construction of that tower. Nothing better in the world to see that tower up there was just I was elated. I couldn't even there was no words. It's just like on cloud nine. I saw my towers like yeah, I couldn't believe it was still there. Allen was so impressed with Bryce Phillips' dedication and the station's vital role in the wake of the storm that she decided to stick around. She spent hours on the air reading announcements and spreading news. As broadcasters he and I realized that that's our mission. We have to stay on the air. I'm Sarah Allen and I'm sitting in for Captain Bryce Phillips. The FCC allowed WQRZ to crank up its power from 100 watts to nearly 2000 enough to expand the station's reach to 30 miles.

Nine months after the storm WQRZ was still Hancock County's only broadcaster and Bryce Phillips was still airing hours of interviews and information every day from a new studio at the County Emergency Operations Center. To me the logic behind getting him high-powered status was so the whole county and even some in Hassan County could hear him. And you know we're still trying to keep his high-powered status at this time. This is WQRZ LP. We've probably saved as many people after the storm that he did before the storm because of being able to tell him where to go get food water nice. How did people in the rest of the county find out that you were on the air? FEMA bought 3500 AMFM radios like that one right up there and they gave them out where they gave out food water nice. And that's how they knew where we were because they gave one to every survivor. So FEMA was actually telling people, here's some food, here's some water, here's some ice, here's a radio.

There are commercial stations in Baloxie and Gulfport which aren't too far from here, weren't they doing the job that was necessary here in Hancock County to keep people apprised to what was going on? Generally speaking those radios stations were providing emergency information and doing a good job at it. The problem was that they could not focus on Hancock County and the needs here in Hancock County given that basically Bay St. Louis wave one diamond head was ground zero for the eye of Hurricane Katrina. How long was it under water? Not more than a couple hours, the whole house. And then from the floor level down, it stayed in water for two weeks at least. Yeah, that's my home. I cannot replace my house. I don't have the money to do it, I'm on security, I get 500 bucks a month. But there's no way I can rebuild my house from much less to studio. So actually in a way that's where I'm in this level of service to my community.

Because when you left with the last resource, you share it with your friends, you share it with your family, and you share it with each other. What makes you want to give and share when you've lost everything? That's what you do. I didn't get into public radio, not to share. Otherwise I'd be in commercial radio. What do you take away from that story? Well, that's an ethic that will be foreign to a lot of commercial broadcasters today. But we'll be quite familiar, I think, to a lot of viewers and people who follow radio. That's a story of a low power FM radio station run by a small number of people in a small, not particularly affluent community, because they care about the place where they live. They want news about the place where they live, they want culture about the place where they live. And at the most fundamental level, they want emergency information when there's a crisis.

And I think that sadly, the track record of the big commercial broadcasters today is that they failed on all of those scores. As you travel the country, what has happened to local reporting to alternative journalism out there? Well, I've seen a decline in the number of people out there doing local reporting. I'm a little afraid of a myth going around that we don't have to worry about the loss of professional journalism, because there are citizen journalists who will make up the difference. I think there are some terrific bloggers out there. Terrific people who sit at their computer and have smart things to say, good editorial writing, lots of good commentary. But actual local reporting, the kind of hard coverage that's regular, sustained, probing, penetrating. That requires resources, it requires skills, it can require institutional backing. That's not the kind of thing that citizens do as well as professionals. And I think this is a time for Americans to be defending professional journalism for what it can deliver. Let's remember that American democracy is intensely local.

That's one thing that makes this country different from many other places. Our city governments, our state governments have tremendous power to shape the institutions that affect our lives, the lives of our family members, our children, in the absence of regular professional reporting, looking at what's happening at the school board, the tax board, the roads, the hospitals, local businesses. We have potential for incredible abuse. To write in your book about the extraordinary levels of local interest in this issue of media reform, like that story in Lafayette, Louisiana, have you found active bipartisan coalitions and other communities around the country? Well, I have, and this is another remarkable thing. We live in a time when Americans are despondent about the so-called cultural wars, the divisions separating the red states and the blue states, derivatives and liberals. But look at the issue of network neutrality or internet freedom. Look at this issue of consolidation and competitiveness in American media markets. You find that Republicans and Democrats alike are coming to the table and fighting for air together.

Is Congress listening? Is the FCC listening? I think what Congress and the FCC understand all too well at this point is that the more open and public and democratic a hearing this issue gets, the less support there is for media consolidation. And so the danger is that Congress and the FCC will rush legislation through before anyone has a chance to really participate. I look for the FCC to be rushing to get legislation passed without a democratic process. I'm very concerned about that. It happened in 2003. There's every sign that it's about to happen again. And again, one reason for writing this book is to issue an invitation for all Americans to get in touch with their local congressional officials, to get in touch with the FCC, and to demand the kind of open free media that once made this democracy in America very strong. That hearing you attended the Los Angeles, as I understand it, word went out about it only three days in advance.

This is incredible. Think about another issue where you could have three days advance notice and find 500 people in an overflowing room at 1 p.m. on a work day to come together and sound off on a major public policy issue. In 2003, the FCC said it would do these kinds of hearings. They started. They then aborted the hearings once it became clear that the message, no more consolidation, was not what the then chairman Michael Powell wanted to hear. And then the commission ignored the public input altogether when it came time to crafting legislation. They got reprimanded by the courts. The order got remanded. It's now back in play. And the question now is whether these kinds of hearings are democracy for show or whether they're democracy for real. Who side does the FCC owe? Well, sadly, it looks like the FCC has been working in the interests of the small number of companies. It's charged with regulating. We need the FCC to be accountable to the people accountable to democracy and responsible for making sure our democratic culture works.

This is an issue that transcends party lines and I have to say for anyone who's despondent right now about the state of America's political culture, pay attention to what Americans have all from all walks of life are doing on media. It's incredible to see these bipartisan coalitions. They're in every city in town. Americans coming together to fight for a better media. The book is Fighting for Air. The Battle to Control America's Media by Eric Kleinberg. And it's out in January. Thank you for joining us. In the meantime, you can go to pbs.org to find out more about media and democracy. I'm Bill Moyers. Thanks for joining us. To track the battle over net neutrality, to find out about municipal wireless projects, and to join the discussion in our citizens class, log on to pbs.org. The Moyers on America series is available on DVD or VHS for 6495. Individual episodes are 2995. To order call 1-800-336-1917 or write to the address on your screen.

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