Mar
19
Written by:
3/19/2010 1:57 AM
The truth has finally been told. Al Gore did not
invent the Internet. Reed Hundt did. Hundt, an FCC chairman in the 1990s, recently
delivered a gasconade at Columbia Business School that would’ve made Cassius
Clay blush. In the space of seven minutes, Hundt drops his close ties to the
former president and vice president, his “10 Commandments” of a national common
medium, and how the FCC first perceived in the 1990s, when he, Reed Hundt
chaired the commission, that the Internet would supplant broadcast as that
common medium.
A video of the speech on
Vimeo is
undated, but Reed’s references to the National Broadband Plan suggest he delivered
his revelations in early March:
“Next week, the United States will declare that broadcast and broadcast in the
form of cable is no longer the common medium, and that the new common medium is
broadband,” Hundt said. “That’s probably not the way the plan will actually
read, so uh, I thought it might be useful if I came and told you what it means,
even if it doesn’t exactly say that.”
Well thank heaven for that, or the rest of us would have mistaken it for the
phone book.
“Now actually, the choice to favor the Internet over broadcast as the common
medium was initially made in first-draft form in 1994 to 1997, by some of the
people who are now running the FCC, and me.”
Hundt, without batting an eye, says that he was confirmed “the same month that
the Internet as a commercial phenomenon was invented, which is exactly what
happened.”
This was kind of a joke, except really it wasn’t.
“I was there for about a month and I got a call from one of Gore’s people and
he said, ‘come and take a look at this,’ and there was this computer and there
was a picture of the Louvre and I said that’s really nice I guess that’s that
thing called a ‘screen saver,’ that’s really cute. He said, ‘you don’t understand,
that’s actually the Louvre.’”
“We decided in 1994 that the Internet should be the common medium in the United
States and broadcast should not be. We did a lot of things between 1994 and
1997 to make that happen, but what I didn’t talk about at the time because I
was afraid to, and also because we were groping towards clarity in our
thinking, but the fundamental thing was this: The United States had 100
percent, essentially, penetration of the telephone networks, and the world’s
largest installed base of personal computers--I think it was about 50 percent
in that time period.”
Reed Hundt goes on to talk about how regulations were created to support the
growth of the Internet under none other than Reed Hundt. And then he actually
says this: “We did a lot of other things. This is a little naughty... we
delayed the transition to HDTV, and fought a big battle against the whole idea
but we lost.”
E.g., clandestine machinations by public officials cost U.S. taxpayers and
thousands of private businesses multiple millions of dollars for something
infighting bureaucrats expected to scrap anyway. I would have to say this is
more nefarious than naughty. “Naughty” is something puppies do on the carpet.
And here we have a fellow gleefully boasting about being the architect of the
debacle.
Yet nauseating as this display of arrogance is, it rings of truth. The FCC clearly has
long favored phone companies over broadcasting for nearly two
decades. There are undoubtedly details yet to be parsed, including which industries
are most lucrative to former FCC chairmen.
Whether or not it’s time for the Internet to replace broadcasting as the
so-called “common medium” in the United States is debatable. More households
have TVs than computers with Internet access. All the same, technologies
evolve, and broadband is going to displace broadcasting. But it’s going to do
so because there’s more revenue upside in subscription technology. Plain and
simple. When all the East Coast Estab blowhards get past this “common medium”
and “public interest” abstrusity, just maybe there can be a reasonably cogent
discussion about how to proceed.