>> coming up tonight on c-span2, "the communicators" with former fcc commissioner michael copps. this week on "the communicators" federal communications commission and dr. michael copps on legislation to reform the fcc consolidation appellate mitigation firms and the state's media. >> host: it's been about four months since michael copps is no longer a member of the federal communications commission, but he joins us here on "the

communicators" to talk about some of the issues that the fcc is currently facing. michael copps welcome back to "the communicators." >> guest: delighted to be here. >> host: eliza krigman is technology reporter with politico. commissioner copps if we could start with a bill that is currently working its way through the house and that is the fcc reform. what do you think about that? is it necessary chris. >> guest: . >> guest: well there's always room for an agency to reform. i like to think that i contributed some to reform when i was acting as the chairman. we opened up the agency made it a lot more transparent, lot more participatory and the biggest reform i would like to see would be to empower commissioners to talk to one another as a group so that we can sit around the table like this and talk about some of the moment his issues and carving the best in the future and our kids future. we are prohibited from doing that for something called the sunshine which was something past way back and that really

is -- nobody operates. i've had members of congress talk to one another and the members of the supreme court who are meeting this week on health care reform will be talking to each other. we can't talk to each other except one-on-one and we have five people who are selected because they have various and diverse capacities. there is a lot of collegiality there and people get along well but i think we have avoided some of the tensions and problems that occasionally come up and we have been able to talk together. so i would like to see congress do that. there are other reforms he could do and i think it would be nice if we put out for example an annual report. i think it would be nice if given the status of where everything is, i think it would be nice to consolidate reports so that kind of process reform is good. is this a vista rating the commission, disemboweling the commission and trying to keep it

from serving the public interest is not process reform but not good for consumers. it's not good for an independent agency. this is an agency that the united states should be proud of. not every country has this, where the white house or at the eighth minister of the government or the minister calls up and tells you what to to do. we have an independent agency was 17 or 1800 real experts that are given some independent so we can serve consumers and help to get the best committee patience and advanced telecommunications out to all of our people. we had a big crowd and knowing that we have to be careful that we don't number one get captured by the folks that you are regulating and number two copies have to be careful to keep that independence of others if you are going to say you can't attach conditions to a merger. that is not with the losses. that's a big change of the law but it's a big change of the way the fcc operates too. and i think some of the

stipulations or proposals that are in that reform legislation would end up not expediting the business of the fcc but slowing the business. i think we would be in court more. i think we would be in court earlier. i think we would have to hire more people just to keep up with all of these requirements. crawford wrote a good article about this in "wired" recently. i was raising my own opinions, but i think we need to tread very carefully before we just go in and change the fcc. >> host: well right after you retired, december 31, 2011 there was an article that came out in an "telecom a.m." and it was dated january 10, 2012. the headline of it was, smooth sailing for corporate doc one copps exits exits from sec. where is your reputation and where you fearful that with you not there as a voice that there

may be some dealmaking done? >> guest: there was a lot of deal make in done while i was there. much of it was done over my objections. i didn't vote against all consolidation and mergers but i wrote a -- my share of them. i think consolidation has been the bane of the industry. i think it has taken is taking the efficiency out of the industry where it is supposed to inculcate. i think it has put the industry in debt to such an extent that when you talk about media and all of the consolidation we have had their you finance the siege deals and how do you pay for them? well lets see, oh wide-awake cut back on this and shut down the news and all that. so yes, some would have you believe that consolidation is over with. that is just one merger after another and of sin is the fcc in proves one, now we have to get

bigger too and you either have them with an outright kind of merger ordeals like verizon and the cable industry and media. we had nbcu within the last year. you have got scripts buying up stations and cumulus, citadel buying up stations and as the economy starts to get better i think we will see more rather than less consolidation. at some point we have got to learn some of these deals while we still have any hope of developing competition and any hope of are storing our media and any hope of really making sure we get advanced telecommunications out to every single american. >> host: eliza krigman? >> guest: one follow-up question to that, in order to -- do we need profits to perform at the fcc order the commissions need a stronger backbone on this? >> guest: well you really have to have, first of all you have

to have an appreciation of what is at stake in the public interest and what are the girls of the communications act and how you interpret them? i think the telecommunications act of 1996 envision all sorts of competition that never saw the light of day both in telecom and in media. so, there are different arguments about it. maybe some people don't think it's as destructive as i think it has been and i think we need to have more commissioners there who are skeptical of all of this consolidation and look around and see the damage that is done in c. that is not serving consumers as it is supposed to be. consumer protection agency and i wanted to be a consumer protection agency. and when it is a consumer protection agency it's a darned good agency for the people of the country. gaska let's talk about the high-profile transaction pending before the fcc, the cable company failing spectrum to

verizon wireless. do you have any concerns or more specifically? >> guest: well i do, i do. call away you will. some will say it's conspiracy and restraint of trade. some will say cobol and some will say cartel and some will say collusion. i am worried about the consumer and the competition and i'm skeptical. obviously i am not -- at that looked at all of it but from my distance it looks like a verizon will get a pretty good deal on control in the wireless market and the cable folks will be reigning supreme when it comes to wireline and they will be working amongst themselves with joint marketing agreements. doesn't strike me as a the way to foster competition and bring down prices. prices are going up and just a week or so it goes the cable bill has out strip the pace of inflation so we need to reverse that. we need to give competition the edge.

if you are going to say no to competition, then how can you talk about gutting the agency and designed some rules of the road for this industry to operate in? you have to have, you have to have it. you have to have oversight especially if you're not going to have competition so people come out with all this process perform eviscerating the fcc. that is wrongly done over the worst of both worlds where you don't have any competition and you don't have any public oversight. at least i certainly hope it's not what his intent. >> guest: either you don't think there's there is enough competition or in the communications market. where should the government intervene to incent more competition and what is the philosophy of that? >> guest: i was at the commission for 10 years and we had lots of opportunities. one of them is to say, the big one is to say no to some of these deals.

the other one is to conduct public-interest oversight. there is lots of proceedings that have been pending for a long time that need to be, special access is one of them that we really need to address, special access in the telecommunications market, because i think that has deserved competition and added to the cost of consumers. so i think taking those issues up and we have a broadband strategy now. that is good for the country. i was lamenting the absence of that for eight years when in the previous administration, when the reigning thought was just let the market get all of this out to the american people. it took us a long time to realize that the market wasn't going to do that. we started off when i came, the commission i guess was number two or three in the world of broadband medication and we are now 15, 20, 24. i don't know exactly but it i

know it's not what your country in my country out to be so there's room for positive government policy. it's the private sector that drives development. it's the private sector that really fields it but always in our history we have had some vision of where we are going and some encouragement and some policy by the government and if ever we needed that, it's right now when we have this imposing and opportunity creating infrastructure in the 21st century. the broadband and the internet and all of that they can open so many doors of opportunity to so many people. we have got to step up to the plate and say look, this stuff is really important. this will determine if her kids get jobs in a far country will regain its internet competitiveness. it's a tough one too. the problems this country faces is it is doesn't have part of its resolution and broadband so there's a huge public interest in that. the commission i think has to be

bold and stepping up to the plate in recognizing and recognizing that times have changed and players changing gatekeepers change over the course of years. you've you got to the study -- study into your dedication to the principle of it and go from there. >> host: michael copps what is up with a verizon cable company spectrum issue a little differently and at this as a spectrum issue. has the fcc been remiss in making sure that spectrum is available, so that perhaps this type of marketing would not need to be done? >> guest: well we need to understand where we are a spectrum. we need to have a better inventory of spectrum than we have. we also i think should have some things closer to eight "use it or lose it" policy. why we get into these big things where we are gone to let them sell this. don't spell spectrum, you sell licenses. it's our spectrum, it's yours

and mine in the people who are watching this so there's a lot of spectrum out there and today at this hour i don't think anybody in begin i has very much of a clue exactly how much spectrum is that i'll but to it's a whole bunch that could fuel a whole bunch of devices and empower over whole lot of technologies so we need to get a handle on that. we hope that the spectrum auctions can clear up some new spectrum although we can talk more about that later. i think it has some potential. i think it has some problems attached to them. we need to be very careful and there is encouraging new technology, smart technologies and so there's lots we can do. i think it's high on the agenda of the commission and i think chairman genachowski and my college down there are very aware of the fact that this is a huge, huge challenge. we are just using up warrant

more spectrum so we have to find better use. there is no silver bullet and we have to be moving on all these friends. >> host: you mentioned the spectrum auctions. do you see -- for see them taking place in their future and if they took place let's say today how long before that spectrum would be on? >> guest: i think it did take a while. they are not going to take place right away and i hope the commission will do everything it can to expedite them. but again we don't want to see that is just some kind of silver bullet solution. let's go and take a whole bunch of spectrum from the consolidating media and turn it over to a big consolidating telecommunications. that does not necessarily translate into automatic enhancement of the public interest so we have to be careful. again we have to be careful about is they're going to be some opportunity for competition? are we going to have a designated entity rules for these auctions? i haven't heard too many people talking about that yet but we need to think about that.

the lost time we had an action we -- auction we waited too late and didn't get around to crafting those rules so we didn't end up at the with the very best rules. but that is important. there are so many, there are so many unintended consequences when you do something this important. what is the impact on public radio or public television? i'm really concerned about that. public television is doing a good job of multicast in using three, four, five programming screens to do really good programming and all of a sudden you know there are going to be a decrease in the number and stations are going to be thrown together. does that mean we will have less program? i'm worried about small diversity stations in big markets who might be really fighting to hold on and now they can sell their license to spectrum. that's not necessarily good in those particular markets. so there are lots of different

ramifications and we need to be careful about how we try them and we are not going to get 500 megahertz through these auctions. i don't know what we are going to get. we will be far short of that so i hope they work. i think we need to expedite them and to them as quickly as possible. it takes a while to get auction rules and all that. meanwhile, we can't let all these other avenues of encouraging technology and all of that slowdown. >> host: you are watching c-span's "communicators" program. our guest, former fcc commissioner michael copps served on the commission for 10 years. also joining us is eliza krigman, of politico. >> guest: you mentioned there is 500 megahertz that is the goal for the president mobile broadband. we are not going to get better auctions in another way is through bring up government spectrum but it's been very hard to do that.

broadband guru, blair levin suggests we should put our effort there and focus on sharing spectrum in other ways to reach that goal. do you think the government needs to be pressured more to free up their spectrum and how should the comp is that? >> guest: i think again we have to get into a real good fix whether it's being used for and some of those uses are pretty heavy users and you have to have sometimes of flying fowl to be used in emergency situations. but we all know how government works and are good -- how government bureaucracy works and our national security apparatus who is not shy on holding onto resources that they need and asking for resources. i am sure there is swaths of some spectrum that could be freed up. it really takes some intestinal fortitude to make that happen, to make that happen.

people and the highest of positions of power are going to have to say, this is going to happen. >> guest: do we need legislation mandating spectrum inventory? i know there are some out there in congress. is this something the fcc can simply take up on its own? >> guest: well we can do it and we have done it to some extent with regard to broadband but you don't have, you really don't have to have an inventory of every square foot in the united states of america but you can do a mandatory i think based on some sophisticated idling and tools like that they can give you a pretty good feel of where we are, and maybe legislation would help. i think the fcc can do something like that anytime it decides and it wants to do it. >> host: but what is the hesitation? >> guest: well, i don't know what the hesitation is. it will take some time and it will take some resources. there are probably monetary constraints attached to it and

it's not a wonderful time for anybody's budget including the federal communications commission. we are pushed so many ways and pulled so many ways. when i got very think we had close to 2000 employees and now it's down in the 1700. the world of telecom media has changed in albany challenges and problems in the technology that you have to understand and train your employees for and for the commissioners to understand, so there's a lot going on and that would take some resources to do that. >> host: as someone who is obviously following taliban mitigations issues for a long time and probably continues to, commissioner copps, what do you think about the cybersecurity bills that are currently working their way through congress? >> guest: well i think we are a day late and a dollar short. cybersecurity, it's a huge problem. i think the capacities of other countries to do us damage,

through cybersecurity all are are already obvious to most citizens and they are very serious. so i think we really have to see this as this would be one of the major fronts of international confrontation here moving forward. so we need to be prepared for that and it has to be a priority. i would say not simply an fcc problem. it goes to everybody's, every agency. >> host: eliza krigman? >> guest: do we need to be concerned about the foreign countries in our national telecommunications issues? >> guest: i think you always do. that is why you have sections of the law that talk about foreign ownership and if indeed this is as critically important and at the same time as vulnerable and infrastructure as it is, and i think you have to be careful of

owning that and operating it. ownership, ownership always matters. that doesn't mean you never allow it and certainly we have allowed lots of foreign ownership and some of that is justified but i think in the stage of hypernational security challenges we need to have a good conversation about that. those stipulations were written long ago, before, probably before cybersecurity was -- so that is one of those issues that needs to be revisited and really needs to be prioritize. i worry that you know, every agency seems to have a cybersecurity guru or a chief. it's got to be somewhere and it has to be the center of that and somebody needs to drive it. i hope we are going to be getting to that. >> guest: on a separate topic, we know you are a big advocate of the open internet and those rules are being challenged in court this year. do you think the fcc is going to

win in court? >> guest: well i certainly hope so. i'm hesitant to predict the outcome of any court cases, and watching the health care reform. we have got some in indecency cases up there with the fcc. i would hope so. as you probably know, i expressed some questions at the time about whether this was the best time to make her case. we had title to i think just looking at in retrospect after these years that we started debating this back in 2002. we were making these awful decisions, not telecommunications for something else and we will put it over here with no oversight rather than over here and took generations to get consumer protections. that was just the wrong way to go, so i think title ii has more

legal clarity, but i am hopeful that we will get some deference on this and the ability to move ahead and if not a recommendation to repair -- >> host: michael copps would you think of the fcc's recent decision on lightsquared? >> guest: well i think it was very difficult. i was there for part of that and they think the experts there, the office of engineering and technology really dug in and did so without prejudice and really try to understand the facts of the matter and was there going to be interference and i was lobbying on both sides, lobbying on the hill and i think, i think

the evaluations drove the fcc. i think it was the best of this -- decision. >> host: would he think about the fact that there's only been three commissioners since you left in december? >> guest: well i think there should be five commissioners and their talking to one another. it operates best when there is diversity of input and moored visors, more commissioners and vigor discussion. so no, it still has a quorum and it still doing business and casting votes and making decisions and there has been very capable people there who seem to get along very very well. so i think they are doing well. i think they would be augmented by two additional commissioners. both of them i know and both of whom will be outstanding members of the fcc.

>> guest: if you could wave your want to have the fcc accomplish one thing in the next six months, what would it be? >> guest: get serious about the media. >> guest: can you be more specific than that? >> guest: well without news and information infrastructure that informs people about the world they live in, i don't see any of the problems facing this country being promptly order rightly resolved, and we have to be really candid about it. we have to dumb down our democratic dialogue and our civic dialogue because of the consolidation that i mentioned earlier. we have sacrificed many journalists and newsrooms and investigative journalism i think hangs down by a live thread because of an fcc that is refuse to the years to step up to the plate in his public interest, oversight responsibilities and this goes back to 1980 with two brief exceptions. weiss to have guidelines for example for broadcast licensees.

all of that is gone now. i would bring some of those back. i would make them new centric and encourage the development of the news and information. but we have all of this wonderful possibility for an enhanced civic dialogue, not just traditional media but new media and the towns where of democracy that can be paved with broadband bricks and the traditional media stripped itself of its capacity to do its job and the new media has not demonstrated there is a model there to replace that. 90 to 95% of the news as you and i and everybody else gets every day, reads every day, even on the internet comes from where? the newspaper in the newsroom and broadcast television. there's so there is so much less of it. this is a serious challenge to our democracy. we have always found ways as a country to keep people informed. you can go back to the days of washington, jefferson and madison, the people who wrote

the first amendment, freedom of the press and all of that but they said we have a new young republican public year. they subsidized newspapers of every stripe, right, left whatever terms they used back then. get it out there and keep the people informed and that is your premise and that is the premise of self-government and an informed electorate will make proper decisions. that was the idea behind broadcast them apart and broadcasters made for use of the spectrum and serve the public interest with convenience and necessity. we have got to get back to that kind of thinking and it's not -- we don't have time to sit around and say well the internet will solve all of this some day. i don't think we can stand another two, three, four or five years of the diminishment media and journalism and news and information. >> host: and finally michael copps would have you been doing for the last four months? >> guest: if you look at my calendar i was almost as busy as

i was at the fcc. i've been trying to make some talks in various areas, keep my issues alive. the one thing i want to do is keep the issues that i was passionate about at the fcc alive and primarily that is media news and information and also broadband minority ownership and female ownership and all of those things that are very important. so i have not made any decisions about if i'm going to find a little home somewhere or do this from my home are what. but i will be speaking out, it joining the common cause, the board of governors recently. i will be joining some more boards and hopefully we will be hearing -- you'll be hearing from enough that you will say one day chico let's have him back. he is still doing some interesting things. >> host: michael copps former fcc commissioner has been our guest on "the communicators" as we go along with eliza krigman of politico. thank you both.

>> thank you for having me. >> just to have the right to come into the office, the