government. real health care reform should cost americans less money, not more. it should provide better quality, not worse, and it should empower patients, not government bureaucrats. by working together, we can do just that. thank you. >> this week, a discussion on a new sec and the future broadband in the u.s.. >> this week on "the communicators, " david cohen joins us. thank you for being with us today. i want to start with the fact that there is pretty much a brand new fcc on the horizon. a couple of new members and chairman coming on line shortly. what are your feelings about the new fcc and the old fcc?

>> it is easier to talk about the new fcc. i think all of the regulated industries under the jurisdiction of the fcc are full of high hopes for this commission. it is more than what we see in spring training every year where you have high hopes for the team, no matter where they may have finished the year before. i think this commission it is incredibly well qualified. you could say that julius is the most qualified and prepared person ever to be named chairman of the fcc, with his business background, his previous experience, his broad interests in telecommunications policy, we think he is going to be an outstanding chairman. surly from his early comments, focused on critical priority areas that we share, in particular the adoption of

broadband in america to help make the united states the most connected nation on earth. we have to hold loafer reduce the holdovers from the last commission. the interim chairman of the fcc showed what an outstanding public servant he is and what an outstanding leader he was. then we have to back new commissioners, both of whom are known to the industry. meredith baker, from her service in the ntma. this is a very eminent fcc. from their comments and their testimony, there are very

focused on moving the telecommunications industry forward and on pursuing policies that will be really impact fulful. >> we have some new leadership in the commerce committees that oversee fcc. how do you think they are going to get along with him as things go forward? senator rockefeller on numerous occasions has said that the fcc needs reform. he is laser focused on it. >> i think not only senator rockefeller, but a lot of people who have focused on that. i think reform of the fcc can come in multiple ways.

it can come from congress or from the commission itself. both the acting chair and the new chairman, in their opening comments, have expressed an interest in many of the reforms that senator rockefeller has championed, which is more openness, more transparency, dated driven results, clearer decision making recalls, better communication internally and extra early. those are the types of things that senator rockefeller has talked about. we seem to have a chair of the fcc who is committed to operating it in that way. i think that philosophically, we see a lot of commonality between the approaches of both chairman rockefeller and chairman waxman. is really early in this game. you can never tell our

relationship will develop, but i think there's a lot of respect among the three. i think there is a real desire to work together and not have an antagonistic relationship between the commissioner and the congress. i am very optimistic about how that works out. i know you are right that rockefeller is later for -- laser focused on the way they conduct their business. they both provide over committees with broad jurisdictional responsibilities. well beyond the telecommunications space. the both have been preoccupied with other public policy issues, and one of the things i say is that if you were to take a poll of 40035 members of congress and 100 u.s. senators and say to

name the five top issues you think this congress has to deal with over the next two years, you will be hard-pressed to find the telecommunications issue in the list of the top 100 that would come out of that polling. i think that is right, by the way. i think the telecommunications industry deserves some credit for that. we are conducting ourselves inappropriate ways and are pursuing agendas that are working for the american consumer and for the country. i think part of it is because of some of the tough and intractable other problems of the country faces and confronts. no one is going to say that reform of the fcc is at the same level of priority as health care or the economy or tax policy or energy or global warming or their appropriations bills, or the budget or immigration

reform, or a host of other complex issues the congress has to deal with. >> on the comcast agenda, what are some of the top legislative issues you would like to see addressed? >> comcast and the cable industry generally are of the view that we do not need a lot of legislative help to be able to accomplish the objectives that we have in front of us. we do not think the current telecommunications act is fundamentally broken. there may be little tweaks that everyone would like to see there. our interest may be more on enhancing telephone competition side of the act, as opposed to the video or high speed data side of the act, but we have a very strong interest in broadband deployment and adoptions. i am not sure how much legislatively there is to do their, and the american

recovery and reinvestment act -- congress included a provision requiring the fcc to prepare a report on broad band in america, which the commission is working on. we have a very strong interest in that plan, because that is a central part of our business and a central part of our commitment to the country. it is possible that out of that plan might come suggested legislative action that then would be of interest to the industry. >> can we talk about that for a minute? there is discussion about expanding the universal service program to cover broadband. what is your view if congress' mood in that direction? >> i need to take a step back. i am not dodging the question, but i need to take a step back. when you talk about universal service as applied to broadband, you are really talking about making broadband ubiquitous lee

available to america. the way it breaks down today, about 63% of america has subscribed to broadband services. broadband is built out to 93% of the country, so 7 or 8% of the country does not have broadband in front of the house as. the remaining 30% have broadband in front of their houses, but have chosen not to subscribe. i call that group the 30%. they are confronting adoption related issues. broadband is available, but people are not subscribing to it. that may be for affordability reasons. it may be the service of the hardware, the computer equipment you need to be able to use the internet, but there also may be cultural issues, training and educational issues. there are senior citizens, no

matter what their income level is. i do not care what they do in their lives, but they may never decide it is important for them to subscribe to broadband. so you have the adoption population. and then you have the deployment population, the people who might want broadband but cannot get it because the plant is not built out in front of their houses. i think most of the dialogue that we hear is around the deployment issues, around getting broadband built out to all of america. >> but you could help with that. >> that is where the common the commonusf have ended up. -- the common conversations about usf have ended up. i am not against ubiquitous deployment of broadband our public policies that would facilitate that. statistically speaking, there

are four times as many americans today who are not some scrubbing to broadband because of adoption related issues as opposed to the deployment related issues. i think of america is to become the most connected nation on earth, we need to have an appropriate public policy and public dialogue focused on those adoption related issues, as well as on the deployment related issues. idb that by way of background to say that some combination of use of government subsidy for stimulus funding or otherwise, potential abuse of usf funding on the employment and may be on the adoption side as well are something that should absolutely be examined. there are some flaws in the universal service fund program, and if we are going to expand the use of that program, we should fix the flaws and make

sure it is being funded fairly and properly, and that the rules of the road are also fair inappropriate, competitively neutral and technology neutral. i think you are right, that is likely to be a part of the fcc's work in the broadband plan, and that might be a place where there is a need for some federal legislation after the fact to fix the usf fund as well as making the funds available. >> mr. cohen, in comcast comments on the broadband deployment plan to the fc, comcast road -- what are you warning against year? >> there are two important notes

about that sense. the first is that it is not good enough, and this is a comment about stimulus funding more than anything else, although it could apply to usf as well. it is not good enough to just a government subsidy for grants or tax credits to get a network built. you also have to have a network that is continuously maintained, which requires an ongoing investment. it is relatively easy, although expensive, to get a network built. you do not have a lot of customers using the extension of that network, there is no ongoing incentive for the private sector to maintain the network, no ongoing financial viability. one of the thoughts embedded in that sentence is that nobody -- everyone needs to realize that having the ubiquitous broadband and having that available will require not only the original construction of the network, but an ongoing maintenance and

an economic reality behind -- underlying that network that would encourage the ongoing maintenance of the network. that is number one. no. 2 is that the government has to be careful. government facilitation of investment, government stimulation of broadband deployment, all may be very inappropriate, but conditions that get attached to it and regulatory requirements that get attached to it could have the inadvertent, because i don't think anyone would intentionally want to do it, could have the added burden consequence of getting in the way of the stimulative effect of the federal policy. for example, i will take the easiest from our perspective,

but a requirement -- a federal governmental requirement that our networks, which are all built with private doctors, with no guarantee of taxpayer return, would have to be -- private dollars, would have to be open to anyone who wanted to wholesale or retail those services at a governmentally regulated rate. that is not a very good way to stimulate ongoing investment in private networks. i am not suggesting that the government is heading in that direction. i don't think that they are, but that most extreme view of so- called net were neutrality, said the networks are so neutral they are available to anyone, and the comcast fiber network that we have spent $60 billion billion over the past decade of private dollars with no guaranteed

return and no government subsidy, that we would be somehow legally required to make that network available on a wholesale rate adder rate to be determined by the federal government. that is not a good way to stimulate us to continue to make investments in upgrading that network and expanding the network. >> that neutrality has been a popular issue to discuss on the hill. the new chairman has been very clear about his view, but not clear about how he would implement. he believes in an open internet. that is a term lot of people use. when you drill down into what does that mean, does that mean that congress needs to adopt legislation in coating that in the law, or does the fcc need to add a principle to its internet policy? before existing principles of

the internet -- how do you see that playing out? >> this is a place where i am actually extremely comfortable that we have julius as chair of the fcc. he has lived on the private side of this equation. it is somewhere between hard and impossible to disagree with any of the policy pronouncements and positions that he has expressed, both before the election and the lead up to the election as a telecommunications adviser, or the things he said in the confirmation hearings or subsequently. we also believe in an open internet and free access to the internet. he also believes the network management and reasonable and responsible network management, because he understands that in the absence of network

management, these networks collapse. the devil is in the details, as you said. not only do you need legislation, you need regulation, but once you sit down and say it is important to have something in writing to do this. when you put pen to paper, it becomes very hard to put down in black and white and in english exactly what you want to do, what the penalties are, and how you will enforce those penalties. we have for internet principles -- four internet principles that at the time that were adopted were explicitly adopted as principles and not as regulations.

there were magically transformed into regulations through a rather unusual enforcement proceeding in the fcc last year. >> involving your company. >> just coincidentally. the decision that arose out of that odd proceeding is now on judicial review. just to be clear, the comcast challenge with that order was not to the fcc's authority or jurisdiction to regulate in this case. it was to the procedure that was used to convert unenforceable, and on regulatory principles into enforceable regulations without a proceeding to accomplish that. i think one of the predicates before you get to the fifth principle is whether the fcc should go to rep proceeding to

convert the of four existing principles into enforceable regulations, and in doing so, whether there are other principles that would get added to those principles to help to appropriately guide isp's and their conduct in the management of those networks. >> you are watching "the communicators." before we leave this area, you also mentioned that one of the legislative agenda items for comcast would be telephone competition and enhancing, as you say. what does that mean? >> the new go back to 1996, were congress passes the latest rewrite of the telecommunications act. the goal of that legislation was to stimulate competition in the video space and in the telephone space. the internet was, even though it

was only 1996, was at most an afterthought. nobody knew what that market was going to look like. the theory on the video space was that the primary competition would take place between cable and satellite, and there was a lot of work done on that legislation to stimulate that. the theory on the telephone space was at the competition would take place between long- distance carriers and the old operating local bell companies. the competition would take place between at&t and mci on one hand, and horizon and quest and sbc on the other hand. -- verizon and quest. the army's did -- the irony is that in has succeeded beyond anyone's expectation. there is dramatic competition in

the video space. it did stimulate competition between cable and satellite, but it also ended up facilitating competition between the bells and cable and satellite, so we are now at a point where in many sections of the country there are four competitive alternatives available for video, cable, one of the bells, and two satellite companies. in the telephone space, is stimulated massive competition as well, not between long- distance carriers and the bells, who seem to have been combined again, literally, but between the cable companies and the bells, now combined with the long-distance companies. there is significant competition that developed in the high-speed data it space between cable and the bells. the moral of the story is that congress sort of got it right in 1996, although technology moves so quickly and in different

ways in congress could anticipate, that they got their competition from unexpected sources. because of that, because the structure of the 1996 act was designed to facilitate competition between long- distance carriers and the bells, and there was no sense that the cable companies are going to be in the telephone business, some of the telephone related provisions in the telcom act are not perfectly designed to be able to facilitate the type of competition that has developed in the telephone world. there is potential confusing jurisdictions between state government and the federal government. our telephone product is a voip product, which really does not subject to state regulation. some states agree with that and some have taken an alternative

review. -- alternative view. there are a variety of disputes, not major disputes, but a variety of disputes they come up between cable and the bells. one of the most visible over the past year was the verizon cable retention marketing disputes, dealing with number portability, where when a bomb rise in customer would call comcast or time warner and say we want to switch -- a verizon customer wanted to switch but keep their same telephone number, comcast or time warner had to give notice to verizon that the customer wanted to switch over and needed the number to be ported. in taking advantage of an

interval for porting that number, would give that intermission to the marketing department, and marketing department would call the customer and try to convince them to stay. in our view, that was a breach of the confidentiality provisions of the telcom act. the fcc found in our favor, and verizon appealed that to the federal court. later in the year, we had a number of days that the bells had to port telephone numbers. in the event horizon is taking a customer back from us, how many days to have to port the telephone number? you can stand in a wireless store and poured the no. what you stand there. horizon was taking a week to 10 days to port the numbers. the commission has come out with

a phased approach of getting it down to two-day portability. we think it could be some tweaks that would improve the competitive environment around telephones. >> we had an article in our news letter this morning that he is working on a truth in billing proposal. as you know, on the hill there has been longstanding interest among some senators on the commerce committee for some type of national wireless framework. this is all to help customers know what they are getting, what they are paying for. what do you think about the kind of item, and how would it affect your company? >> i also have not seen the details on it. it is interesting, at least on the telephone side. the comcast digital voice

product is as clean and simple a product as possible. our basic comcast digital voice product is if you pay a certain amount a month, you get all long distance included, you get 14 delineated services with no extra charges, so our bills are clean and simple. >> no one complains about them? >> no one complains about them, and the product is very simple. one of the great marketing advantages is that unlike the competition, one of the reasons we are so successful is that we combine local and long-distance into one price, and we also got rid of -- one of the things customers hated is if you want call forwarding, or you want caller id or voice mail, there was an extra charge in the bell

product. $3 a month for this, $5 a month for that. we have the 14 most popular services all included in our one-size-fits-all price. our telephone bills are clean, simple, and easy. as far as i know, i do not think there would be any impact on us in that area. >> i will throw some numbers at you, and you will have 30 seconds to answer. this is looking at the comcast pac contributions to political candidates. in 2006, comcast gave about $120,000 each to democrats and republicans. for the house reps in this, about 395,000 went to democrats, 400 $52,000 to republicans. -- $452,000 to republicans.

are republicans not important in your business model? >> republicans are very important in our business model. in fairness, you are comparing an entire cycle to a partial cycle. there are we more democrats today than there were four years ago. there are significantly fewer republicans today than there were four years ago. i think you will see roughly competitive but balanced with an adjustment for the substantial democratic majority that occurs in the house and senate. our issues are bipartisan issues. we work with republicans and democrats, and i think we are known as the company that is fair in our support, and that does provide support across both sides of the aisle. >>