Being an amateur radio operator I pay a little more
attention to the goings-on at the Federal Communications Commission than the
average person might. So, when President Trump selected Buffalo-born Ajit Pai
to chair the FCC back in January, I cringed. The former associate general
counsel of Verizon is more aligned with larger broadcasters and communications
companies than most of the other commissioners are.
Ten months into watch, the FCC hasn’t failed to
disappoint.
Between deregulation and corporate favoritism, the
agency is on the path of allowing greater corporate control of public airwaves
and the internet, squashing the ability of the little guys to compete and the average
citizen to communicate.
The latest example was last week’s 3-2 vote by the
Commission to eliminate the Home Studio Rule.
Basically, that long-held regulation mandated that
broadcasters have a studio in or near the city they are serving. The rule made
sense: the FCC grants license to commercial broadcast enterprises with the
expectation that the stations serve their home communities (with news, alerts,
services, etc.) and act as economic engine (by running local advertisements and
employing local workers).
By scratching that requirement, even more power will
be given to the giant AM and FM conglomerates that are already dominating the
airwaves. They can now fully remotely control and feed programming into
transmitters, stifling local content, firing disc jockeys, emptying news rooms,
and making all music and news sterile and similar from city to city. That
bottom-line benefits gleaned from that will also allow them to further strangle
the locally-owned-and-operated stations that actually do their duty to the
community and have become an increasingly rare breed (broadcasters such as
Lockport’s WLVL, Batavia’s WBTA and Wellsville’s WJQZ).
Even if you are not an avid radio listener (which
many younger Americans aren’t, what with availability of digital players,
streaming services and more) the FCC will hurt you by stifling the thing you
love the most – your internet connection.
In a February installment of this column I wrote
about the need to include the upgrade of rural internet access as a component
of Trump’s infrastructure plan. As a critical piece of the modern economy,
high-speed internet could drive economic development into communities that need
a major shot in the arm (Rural America’s poverty rate is 18%). I noted at the
time that only 55% of rural residents could achieve a connection of 25 megabits
per second, which is the FCC’s current threshold for broadband.
Well, the FCC recently announced that it plans to
redefine what constitutes broadband.
The Commission wants to
decrease that download speed to only 10 megabits per second, allowing internet
and cellular service providers to seriously scale back the quality of their
offerings to places like Upstate New York. Slower speeds would only bring pain
and heartache to the farms, start-ups, and mom-and-pop businesses who need
high-speed connections to bring their goods to market, attract customers and
employ their neighbors.
As if that’s not bad enough, Pai has said on
numerous occasions that he is in favor of rolling back net neutrality protections
that were recognized by President Obama’s FCC in 2015. Those rules say that
internet service providers cannot choose which data is sent more quickly and
which sites get blocked or throttled backed based on which content providers
pay a premium for.
If the big players had their way, companies like
Netflix could pay Verizon a handsome sum to stream their services at a high
rate of speed while dramatically slowing down (to make room on the information
highway) the ability of other users to say, upload their photos, watch their
online college courses, or download work documents. Whoever would pay the most
would get the best, taking away the everyone-is-equal system that currently
defines data transfer on the internet.
That’s a little unnerving, because the internet is quickly
becoming our last means to access diversity of thought thanks to the
abandonment of the Home Studio Rule and Pai’s proposal announced at a
congressional hearing last week. There he said he’d like to, this November,
throwaway media ownership rules launched in 1975 that prevented the same
company from owning TV/radio stations and newspapers in a given media market.
If Pai has his way, a few media magnates could
control the news you read, the news you hear, the news you watch and ultimately
the news you download.
That’s frightening.
It’s obvious that this is no longer the people’s
FCC.
From the 30 October 2017 Greater Niagara Newspapers