June 24, 2008
George Lucas testifies before House subcommittee
I wouldn't normally bring this (C-SPAN RealPlayer stream) to your attention, as it's a lengthy(2:20:00), streaming video of a House subcommittee hearing, but it's where I spent my morning, and George Lucas was there. I organized a field trip for about a dozen FCC interns. You can see me over the left shoulder of Ray Ramsey (starting around 50:00) (I'm not staring off into space, I'm looking up at the screens which enable the audience to see the witnesses' faces). Mr. Lucas testimony begins starts around 55:00. The hearing was interrupted twice for a roll call vote on a motion to adjourn to unsuccessfully prevent the passage of H.R. 4661, a Medicare bill. The Legislature makes the Executive look downright efficient.
The hearing was about proposed reform to the Universal Service Fund, a program created by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to promote telephone access for every American household, regardless of location. It's largely been successful, as approximately 95% of the country has a telephone. What you may not know about it is that it constitutes approximately 11% of your telecom bills monthly, which can be pretty steep. The proposed reforms seek to address the fact that the fund is targeted pretty much exclusively to the provision of local voice telephone service, which is now no longer viewed as that big of a deal.
The political debate here is rather unusual. The USF doesn't actually affect most Democratic members of Congress directly, as most of the fund goes towards remote rural areas, almost all of which reliably vote Republican. Yet they are drawn to the issue as many of their key supporters--low-income urbanites--who technically have access to telecom services can't afford them, while relatively affluent rural areas receive substantial subsidies. On the other side of the aisle, Republicans who would in other contexts be avidly pro-market and anti-subsidy find themselves supporting a fairly substantial ($51 billion so far) government initiative. Still, pretty much everyone thinks that the USF 1) is in desperate need of reform, 2) should probably include broadband, and 3) is likely to include wireless service, so a bill which touches on all of those issues has promise.
