ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, December 18, 1995 TAG: 9512180060
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
Four Virginia congressmen, including two from Western Virginia, are serving on a conference committee hammering out the first major revision of a national telecommunications law in 61 years.
Two Republicans, Thomas J. Bliley of Richmond and Bob Goodlatte of Roanoke, and two Democrats, Rick Boucher of Abingdon and Robert C. Scott of Newport News, are among the 33 House members on the committee. No other state has as many conferees.
Once signed into law, the bill will set the rules by which a drastically different telecommunications industry will operate in the future.
The bill, among other things, lets local phone companies into the TV cable business and allows TV cable companies to enter the local phone business. It enables long-distance companies such as AT&T and Sprint to offer local phone service and allows local phone companies, including Bell Atlantic, to sell interstate long-distance services and to manufacture and sell telephone equipment.
The bill will overturn the laws of 25 states that say telecommunications services shouldn't be competitive, Boucher said. Virginia is not one of those states, however. Virginia changed its law to allow local telephone competition this year.
Boucher has been a longtime proponent of telecommunications revisions. He has sponsored a variety of measures since he and then-Sen. Al Gore introduced a bill in 1988 that probably kicked off Congress' move toward changing the law.
That first bill would have allowed phone companies to offer cable television, a scarce service in Boucher's rural district. That change is at the core of the bill now before Congress, Boucher said.
Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde, R-Ill., named Goodlatte as a conferee because of the Virginian's interest in protecting the authority that local zoning boards have over where telecommunications transmission towers should be situated. Goodlatte is a member of the House Judiciary Committee, which oversees antitrust matters.
Goodlatte was the author of a compromise proposal on how to keep indecent material on the Internet out of the hands of children. The proposal, agreed to Thursday night, removed one of the major stumbling blocks in the way of completing work on the bill.
The only major issue that remains is the antitrust issue of how media companies will be allowed to make alliances, merge or make acquisitions within a given community. Boucher and Goodlatte are optimistic that work on the bill could be complete early this week.
Boucher says the bill will be one of the most important pieces of legislation coming out of the current Congress, and he sees the bill as a massive job-creation measure. The bill will create tens of thousands of jobs manufacturing telecommunications equipment and constructing plants and lines to bring the new services to this country, he said.
Craig Ellis - a securities analyst who follows the telecommunications industry for Wheat First Butcher Singer of Richmond - agrees with Boucher that the bill will create many jobs. But Ellis said the bill also will cost some jobs for Bell Atlantic and other regional phone companies, as companies pare down for the new competition. But "the winners far outweigh the losers," Ellis said.
The bill will boost economic development, Ellis said, because improved communication will allow a variety of jobs to be performed in parts of the country where they could not be located before.
The bill will lead to the creation of the much-touted "information superhighway" as phone companies build the fiber-optic lines needed to carry video signals and as TV-cable companies install the electronic switches required to provide telephone service, Boucher said. Telecommunications services will be more plentiful and prices better after the bill becomes law, he said.
Consumer groups' fears that the bill will lead to media concentration and higher prices are unrealistic, Boucher said. For the first time, he said, consumers will be able to choose their telephone and cable TV providers. Boucher said he is working to ensure the bill contains provisions assuring competitive access to local communication networks.
Goodlatte said he has been interested in and supportive of allowing competition in the telecommunications industry since he arrived in Congress three years ago. The policy of the 1934 federal communication law, Goodlatte said, has been holding back the improvements that new technology can offer.
As a result of the bill, jobs and business opportunities will be created in remote communities where they weren't possible, Goodlatte agrees.
Goodlatte's desire to protect the rights of local zoning boards helped land him on the conference committee. He has managed to keep authority for locating telecommunications transmission towers in the hands of local zoning boards, as long as they don't discriminate in their decisions.
But he probably will be best remembered as the author of a compromise proposal on how children should be protected from explicit sexual material on on-line services and the Internet.
The House conferees had been debating whether to go along with Hyde of Illinois and adopt a tough "indecency" standard for controlling material on the Internet, similar to one adopted in the Senate bill, or to support Rep. Rick White, R-Wash., who favored to measure material by whether it was "harmful to children." White's proposal, unlike Hyde's, provided protection from liability for Internet-access providers who have no control over what others post on the Internet.
After White's proposal passed 17-16 Thursday night, Goodlatte asked for a vote on his compromise, which took Hyde's indecency standard and combined it with White's protection for Internet access providers. Some White supporters liked Goodlatte's idea better.
The agreement defines indecency as "any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image or other communication, that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs." Violators who make "indecent" material available to children will be guilty of a federal crime.
Critics, including civil libertarians, have pointed out that the proposal will stifle creativity and could result in major works of art being banned for the Internet. In answer, though, Goodlatte said legitimate art works will be protected by the requirement that material must be considered in its context.
"The Internet is a public place," Goodlatte said, "and where you have children using it in great proliferation, you have got to have a standard of decency applied." The standard is no different from the one already applied to the television and telephone industries, he said.
Certain adult services, such as Playboy magazine, would still be allowed on the Internet as long as efforts were made to screen out children with methods such as the requirement of a credit card, Goodlatte said. Obscenity, however, would be forbidden in all cases, as it already is in other media.
Both Boucher and Goodlatte said they want the final form of the legislation to ensure that communication service will continue to be accessible in rural areas of the country at affordable prices.
Both believe the committee will finish its work before the holiday recess.
"The only major issue not resolved is the extent to which there may be media concentration in a given community," Boucher said.
"That," he said, "is not likely to hold up this train at this point."
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