>> host: we are pleased to welcome back to "the communicators" fcc commissioner michael copps. also joining us is jonathan nape from communications daily. commissioner copps, we appreciate you coming over and talking about some of the issues facing the fcc, and i want to jump right in with one of the

issues that is a little nebulous right now, and it deals with the court case, net neutrality and the ftc. there's a provision in the house financial regulatory bill that would give the ftc, the federal trade commission, power over the internet, thus taking it away from the fcc. what do you think of that, and did i interpret it correctly? >> guest: well, i don't know if it's taking away or sharing, you know, this is a huge infrastructure, ecosystem information technologies and broadband that we're talking about. i don't think any one agency or any one office has a monopoly on addressing it. i think the ftc has things it should be doing, i think the fcc has things that it should be doing, so i think there's room for both, and i'm happy to see both agencies interested in this and alive to the responsibilities that they have. they both have jurisdictions. >> host: so would you say, though, that the fcc's

jurisdiction has been lessened because of the court case? >> guest: i think the fcc's jurisdiction has lessedden by the policy decisions made back in 2002 and 2005 which issued kind of a guilt-edged invitation to the courts to step in and say you've done wrong. >> host: just a quick follow up when you're referring to the 2002 and 2005 decisions, is that the esl and cable modem classification service? >> guest: right. >> host: i guess that brings us to the present now. we've had the comcast ruling by the d.c. circuit april 6th. the big question now is how will the fcc perceive what net neutrality rules, something you've spoken passionately about, is reclassification that is taking broadband service from a title i to a title ii common carrier service the only way

that you can see that the fcc can proceed right now and continue its net neutrality proceeding and actually have that come in order? >> guest: well, the short answer is, yes, i think that's the route to go. but before we get into the arcane ya of all of this, i think it might be helpful for your listeners to really understand what's at stake here. you have this absolutely mind-boggling new infrastructure. we have this evolving telecommunications infrastructure that offers so much promise, so much potential to the american people to change their lives for the better, to create opportunity, to help them find jobs, take care of themselves, engage in the civic dialogue. and the question is what rights are consumers going to have to control their online experience? is this going to be the maximum extent possible, give the consumers control over where they go on that internet, what applications they can run on

that internet, what devices they can attach, what transparency they can expect from the companies who provide the internet services and to expect some competition too. are we going to work for that, or is this going to become the province of the gate keepers and the toll booth collectors? and the answer to me in that is clear. we've got this wonderful technology, probably the most transformative technology since the printing press from the standpoint of doing all the things that i said before. and we've been heading down the road for the last eight years of saying, well, that's not even telecommunications, it's not advanced telecommunications, so let's call it something else. we went through this ridiculous intellectual charade in 2002 and 2005. let's call it something it isn't, let's stop calling it what we have been calling it. so we ended up robbing these

advanced communications of all the protections that generations of reformers, of consumers and advocates had worked so hard to graft, excuse me, on to the telecommunications, basic plain old telephone service. consumer protection, privacy, security and safety for the public. so why don't consumers have a right to expect that that's going to transfer as telecommunications evolved instead of saying, oh, no, we're going to move everything to broadband here verge. you know, broadcast, everything's going to be on that. start from blank, no consumer protection, no privacy. i mean, that's just -- it's ironic, but it's really more than ironic, it's kind of tragic to think as we move toward this all-encompassing ecostructure or ecosystem that it's going to be bereft of those things. when we went through that

charade of reclassification, i don't think the folks behind that were really looking to make sure that title i could serve those purposes. they were looking to get this out from under that, and they were responding to the special interests who basically said, give us a free hand. so fast forward to your question which i'm not trying to evade, but i think that background is important. so i think what we did was not sustainable from a legal stand point, and the courts noticed that too. do i think the courts could have taken a more expansive view of title i? yes. do i think they could have shown us more deference than they did? yes, i do. this ecosystem is evolving very quickly. we don't have a year or two years or three years or five years to come up with wonderful new permutations of title i authority, and every time we do that, someone's going to drag us into court. the cleanest way to do this, the

best way to do this, in my mind the only viable way to do this is to reclassify. short answer to your question was, yes. >> host: but wouldn't that also lead to court cases? >> guest: everything we do, i've found out in the nine years i've been there, leads to court cases. so when you go into court, you want the strongest case, and i think that's the strongest way to go. just say we're calling this what it is, we're calling it what the american people think it is. let's treat it that way. and i think that's the best foot forward in the court rather than trying to invent all these wonderful new angles on something that's just going to be -- that's like death from a thousand cuts. >> host: you are in the majority now, and is it fair to say that you're the only commissioner who has said out loud that we need to move it from title i to title ii -- >> guest: well, i'm only going to speak for myself. i'll say it again, i'm for reclassification as a title ii

service, and i'm hoping when the dust settles, that we will have a majority at least as in favor of doing that. >> host: let me ask you about the impact of basically not dickering around. this shouldn't be a multiyear stage for reclassification. >> guest: yeah. we can't afford that. >> host: what is your, what sense have you got? sometimes commissioners meet with investors in san francisco, to wall street about the investment community's reaction let alone the telecommunications industry's reaction should there be a reclassification? would there be a flight from these stocks, more risk adversity in terms of an investment strategy? >> guest: i don't think there's going to be a flight from the most transformative infrastructure change that's taken place in our economy right now. our future is going to be in this. we have a broadband plan that's dedicated to building where could out you -- broadband out

ubiquitously, it's going to be hugely transformative in terms of jobs and all that, so i would hope that the investment community and the political community and the legal community and the judicial community and all of us would take an expansive look at that, just step back and look. there's no reason it should do that. calling something what it is and exercising some measure of public interest oversight on it shouldn't scare investors off. you need, investors need confidence. they need some sense of a surety of the rules, and that's another reason not to go down this experimental route. are we going to try this new angle on title i? they're going to sit there and say, what are these guys doing? why don't we just make a decision? this is going to be the rule of the road, and i think investors understand what the game is, and they get back in. and even in a bigger fashion, and we get on with building this infrastructure that is so important to the future of every citizen in this country.

>> host: let me ask about another way to provide certainty, and if that's something you've spoken very highly of in the past commission, i believe it was 2006 there was an industry/public interest compromise that was later enshrined in fcc rules on digital multicasting what sorts of ads you can show and for how long. do you think there's any way that all sides in the net neutrality reclassification debate could get together, present the commission with some sort of voluntary solution that might be able to get around the court cases, what some say the concern in the investment community of the commission doing something in a mandatory way? >> well, i think that would be a happy outcome to have that sort of undertaking and conversation hopefully leading to a consensus, and i think that chairman genachowski has certainly provided the kind of

atmosphere for give and take as you can see in the whole development of the broadband plan. that would be encouraging, circumstances like that. at the end of the day, though, assuming you get that consensus, then i'm assuming that people would be willing to recognize that was going to provide the basic guidelines upon which the commission was going to proceed. so we would, so that that would be apparent to everybody. whether you could do that in a voluntary way, not in a voluntary way, but have it out there as a voluntary guideline or commitment. probably it would be better for the commission to find some way to recognize that and to affiliate itself with that so you have rules of the road so that when you went to court, you were going to court, again, with your best foot and some solid ground. >> host: a consensus that ends up being adopted as the rule of the road. >> guest: i think that'd be good. i'm not saying it has to end that way, but that would be my

reaction at this point. >> host: commissioner copps, are you pleased with the rollout of the national broadband plan so far? >> guest: i am. i think this is the result of the most open and transparent process that i have seen in my nine years at the fcc. we had many, many workshops, we had hearings, thousands and thousands of pages of records. so it was really in depth. the chairman had lots of folks within the fcc, some newer folks he brought in, but most particularly the wonderful team we have there to really focus on this infrastructure challenge, and i think it was comprehensive doesn't mean it's exactly the plan that i would have written or any other commissioner might have written, but i think it was, it was something i've been waiting for for nine years, and you will recall the other times i've been on the show i've said why doesn't this country have a national broadband strategy?

why are we number 15 or 20 or 24, 25 depending on which year you and i were talking here. let's get in the game, let's do what every other industrial country on the face of this green earth does, and that's have a broadband plan. finally we got a new administration and a congress who said this is integral to america's recovery and reinvestment in the future, and they charged us with developing that. i was just happy to see him say we should have a broadband plan. that was really music to my ears when they said have the fcc do it, and i think the fcc did a credible job in trying to put something together. we've got a long way to go, and there's lots of ts still to cross and is still to dot before we get broadband ubiquitously out there. there might be variations along the way of things that we think are going to work that don't end up working. >> host: two follow-ups.

number one, do you agree with former chairman reed hundt when he said that broadband is the new national media? >> guest: no question in my mind that broadband is so absolutely fundamental to the future of our media. now, how quickly and how much of our media is going to migrate to broadband, i think is an open question n. the next two years, three years, five years, i am not at all ready to say we can fast forward and just worry about the media of the future. we do need to have that discussion. i've been calling for that for years and years too. what happens if and when radio and television move there, and if newspapers really continue to diminish, how do you protect the public interest? that's a conversation we need to have. but for the next i think several years, the folks in the traditional media, the newspapers and the broadcast stations are still going to

produce the overwhelming bulk of the news and information that this country gets. that's anywhere now between 80-95%. even the news that folks read on the internet comes from the newspaper and the broadcast stations. there are not as much of it as there used to be because of the crisis we've had in journalism and in the industry generally. there's less news, but it is coming from there, and we need to figure out what happens to that journalism, what happens to that diminishing news and information in this period of possibly years as we migrate to the new media because i don't think that this country can really afford to have four or five or six or ten more years of the kind of disintegration and dim in addition of journalism that we have seen in the last 15 or 20 years with newsrooms shuttered, investigative reporting being an endangered species. you know we have 27 states i am

told, 27 states no longer have an accredited reporter on capitol hill. if it is one of the functions of journalism to hold the powerful accountable, how do you hold them accountable? i see it down at the fcc. we've got good folks like jonathan and a few others, but we don't have as many reporters covering what mike copps is doing or julius genachowski or anybody else. and it's good to have that coverage, and the people need to have that coverage. so i think that, and this is for a longer discussion but some of the bad private sector and public sector decisions that have been made with our media, that we are skating per perilously close to denying the public, and i am worried that new media is starting down that same road as traditional media

of too much consolidation, too many bad private sector decisions, too many bad public sector decisions. >> host: and i think jonathan will have a follow up on that. first, one more follow up with regard to broadband. do you see the universal service fund, how do you see it being affected with money going toward traditional telephone services and broadband, and do you see a need for an increase in the usf? >> guest: yeah. we need to use universal service, it's a critical tool to help us reach our objectives. by no means is it the only tool that's going to get broadband ubiquitously deploy inside this country. obviously, private investment is the lead locomotive, but the universal service fund can play, i think, a mightily important role in the supporting that. it is necessary to modify that fund and make it primarily a broadband fund. we still have some challenges, as you know, in voice and some

areas in the country where you're lucky if you have two-thirds of folks even have voice service. so we can't get out of that bid, but by and large we need to transform it into the infrastructure of the future, and universal service has a role to play in that. i understand about contribution factors and all that, and people get nest, and i get nervous, too, but this job's not going to get done on the cheap, and i'm not into making promises that we're going to hold the universal service fund at such a level forever and ever. >> host: this is c-span's communicators program. our guest is fcc commissioner michael copps. jonathan make of communications dale is also with us. >> host: commissioner copps, you raise a number of interesting points about both traditional and new media, some of that, of course, relates to the execution of the national broadband plan which we were just speaking

about. so to take one data point, if you will, part of the plan sees tv stations and large markets essentially giving back some or all of their spectrum so that there can be more, faster wireless broadband. as that occurs, what concerns does that raise in your mind about continuing to have the, as you would like to see, vigorous public interest oversight of tv stations? if there are fewer of them and some of them are giving back a chunk of the airwaves, how do you achieve both of those things? >> guest: well, i'm glad you ask that question, and i'm hoping it's a question that we will be alive to. there's no question in my mind that we need more spectrum from wireless technologies. exactly how much i don't know. we will be doing some measurements, and congress is considering a spectrum inventory bill, so we would understand exactly how much spectrum is being used in this country right

this minute as the three of us talk. nobody has a clue how much of it is being used and how much is just kind of sitting there, would be available for other uses. so the first thing to do is to get that kind of a feel for it. but we do know we're going to need more spectrum. i think there are some areas in the country where some of that broadcast spectrum might be freed up, but it raises a lot of questions how you do that. first of all, you need to have some congressional authority to do that, and we'll have to see how that evolves. but to me all spectrum is public interest spectrum, and its utilization and every sphere and sector across that broad swath needs to be dredged from the public interest. but this broadcast spectrum is particularly public interest-oriented because we rely so heavily on it to inform the american people. my advice to broadcasters is

this: if the you want to really make sure that that spectrum is not going to be too much of it taken away, figure out what the best public use of that spectrum is right now. i said to them years and years ago, we're going digital. we're going to have all of this multicast opportunity so that in the same w the same amount of spectrum that you broadcast at one standard definitional channel, you cannot only do hi-d, you could do program streams that could reflect your local communities. that's broadcasting strength. local contacts, local communities. so you can do a better job of covering the diverse elements of your community. what are they contributing to your community? what issues are they interested in? you can do a better job of covering local politics. i mean, every time we have an election year i search in vain for tv on coverage of local races because they don't do a very good job by and large of covering all those things.

so that's really public interest broadcasting. independent producers in there, showcase local music, local talent and all the rest. you know, had they done that -- i'm not saying nobody has done that, but it hasn't reached anywhere near critical mass. a lot of that spectrum is not, most of it is not being used for purposes like that. but had it been used for that, i think people would have been much more reluctant to come up with ideas for let's take that spectrum away. so i want to see that spectrum used for public interest, and when the time comes, if it comes, that we really go forward with this plan that's kind of how i'm going to be looking at it. if that spectrum is really being used for the enhancement of the public interest in local areas, for the enhancement of localism and diversity, i would be much more amenable to keeping that spectrum in the hands of broadcasters. >> host: well, i guess in a way that's a double-edged sword.

you're say anything part broadcasters, or at least some, have brought this present state on themselves. on the other hand, they can show that their airwaves should not be repurposed by doing more -- >> guest: in my mind. that's me talking. >> host: how, though, can you get buy-in from tv stations and also from their lobbying groups here in washington, the national association of broadcasters, the association for maximum service television? they have said, look, our members are not interested -- we want to serve the public. we want to use all of our spectrum, but we can't do that while also fully serving the public interest if we have to give back some of that spectrum. so how can that be balanced? >> guest: well, they can engage in the discussion, and i had this discussion with the nab as recently as yesterday. why don't we tee this up? i mean, these folks are a little bit on the defensive with regard to some of the spectrum plans that are out there, spectrum

fees and all of that. so i would think the time would be ripe for them to engage in some discussions with folks who wish broadcasting a full and wholesome future. that shouldn't be hard to do. i travel around this country, i talk not only to the associations here in washington, but i talk to a lot of state broadcasters. there are a lot of broadcasters in this country who express the flame of the public interest still burns brightly. it's more difficult for them to do their job in the environment we've evolved into in this country. it's harder and harder to justify that expenditure on local news when wall street is saying, well, you made 10% last year, you've got to do 15 this year. you struggle and cut and then they say, oh, sorry, we're going to 20. you've got to keep the investment community happy. that's not the future for the kind of news and information that this country needs, and that was the deal in the first

place. you guys get the spectrum, the public spectrum, the people's spectrum for free in return for being good stewards of it and providing people with the news and information that they need. >> host: well, what about an update, then, on the nbc/comcast potential merger? >> guest: well, i don't know what the update would be. there is no update from me. i've always said that would be, that remains a steep climb, as you know. i have not been very enamored with industry consolidation in the past. i think it's been highly destructive for not only the public interest, i think a lot of companies too. i think there are a lot of broadcasters now who might be looking back and saying maybe, maybe that hyperspeculative phase that they got involved in ended up being not so good after all. so there's a lot of people who want to do a good job. we have to work to create an environment in which that's possible.

we have got to do a better job of getting the news and information people need. that's the biggest challenge facing us in the communications field right now. that's the number one thing that i respond to because i really am worried about how do we get information out to the american people? this is not a new problem for the united states of america. you can go back to the founding fathers, and you can find the quotes from george washington, thomas jefferson, james madison saying that the infrastructure of that day which was newspapers was mightily important to everybody in the country. so they found a way to support that information infrastructure with postal subsidies for newspapers. they didn't pick newspapers, they didn't pick winners and losers, they were partisan papers on all side. they said all the newspapers should get postal subsidy, newspapers should be able to ship to newspapers free, and there should be subsidies to get

them out there. that was the premise of their experiment of their democracy of the country they were building. they really didn't know if they could make that republic work, that far-flung country. so they said we've got to get information out to the american people, and that's the same challenge that we have now. they found ways to do it. we found ways to encourage that with spectrum for the broadcasters. and now we have, we have that challenge again. so if the technologies change, the lingo changes, the democratic, small d democratic challenge remains throughout the course of our history. >> host: jonathan make, final question. >> >> host: following up on your concerns about any media transaction. comcast says if you, the fcc, and the justice department allows it, nbc will be a stronger property. we're committed to keeping it over the air. so are there, two-part question.

is there a way that that would actually be beneficial to the public interest, and then you often have talked about transparency. while keeping that in mind, how can the commission make sure that itself review of the -- its review of the deal is as transparent as possible? >> guest: i think we should have some public hearings. this is not without precedent at the fcc. we did that with aol, the case some years ago. we've done it on other occasions too. and i think, i think you have to really look. there are a lot of questions to be asked here. you know, is this going to have an impact on consumer rates and on cable? is this going to have an impact on access to the internet? what's it going to do to programming, local news and all those things. a stronger nbc? yes, we could use a stronger nbc in some ways, maybe not in

others. so we really have to get in and measure that. again, i'm the guy who's about localism and diversity, and i think democracy flourishes when you have, when you have that control in the community to the extent possible in broadcasting, in newspapers and all the rest, and we've been heading in the wrong direction for the last 25 or 30 years. >> host: as always, commissioner copps, we appreciate your coming on "the communicators" to talk about the issues facing the fcc. jonathan make of "communications daily," thank you also. >> eight governors, including republicans tim pawlenty and rick perry and democrats bill richardson and joe manchin, talk about job creation. live coverage as the u.s. chamber of commerce gets underway this morning at 9 a.m. eastern on c-span2.