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Telecommunications Policy Roundtable:
Cutting Across Turfs to Change Public Policy

by Andy Oram

CPSR News Volume 15, Number 2: Spring 1997

In this issue of The CPSR Newsletter, we concentrate on telecommunications and CPSR's collaborative relationships in the Telecommunications Policy Roundtable (TPR). In our work on telecommunications, we as an organization have adapted successfully to developing events in two important ways:

1. Large numbers of CPSR members took on a new field of technology- telecommunications or telecom and mastered its principles enough to have an impact on public thought.
2. Segments within CPSR reached out beyond our usual constituents and formed lasting, productive relationships with a range of new allies.

We made some good strides -- and some good friends. In this issue we explain what Telecommunications Policy Roundtables are, how activists are using them, and what directions these roundtables suggest for further CPSR work.

Why Telecom?
Why should a group of computer developers and users get involved in questions of how the telephony industry expands, what happens to cable TV, and so on? One answer is obvious: computer scientists have been saying for years that computers and computer networks would merge with telephones and television, the other major media of our age. I don't know how many of us really believed it. Certainly, it's only in the past couple years that the telephone companies, cable companies, etc., have started to believe it. But all of a sudden, computer/telephone technology and multimedia are emerging, not only as a dazzling set of products that benefit end users, but as a complex regulatory and policy arena that we have to learn about.

In the past 10 years we have all seen that computers are much less interesting, in social terms than the networks that tie the computers together. But these networks run 99 percent over telephone lines. We'd better get to understand telephone technology, industry, and regulatory structure. We must also pay attention to other possible media for digital transmission, such as cable TV and wireless radio. Ignoring any of these areas is like fiddling around with the water faucets in people's houses but entirely missing the lead that enters the water from municipal pipes.

Certainly, telecommunications is a new area for most of our members, with its own theory and history. We all like to call ourselves "technical experts" because we can write Perl scripts. But telephone technology is a whole new area of discourse, replete with terms like LECs, SLCs, IXCs, and RBOCs.

(Quiz: three of those acronyms represent types of telephone companies, while one is a fee. Which is the fee? You pay it every month!)

Telephone service is provided by batteries of different components, continually growing more sophisticated, and spread among a range of providers. The companies are investing millions to find clever, unanticipated ways to make an extra buck off each other and the public, a situation not made any simpler by the tangled net of regulations that governments have woven over the past century (and much of which they are now trying to unweave).

Deregulation and competition have an international aspect, as illustrated by Jerome Thorel's report "Telecom Giants Battle for Online Content: Focus on France" in this issue. While privatization of other companies has led to strikes and riots, the European public has accepted telecom deregulation without comment. Current service is lousy, prices unreasonably high, and innovation almost completely absent-so I expect that everyone is hoping the situation will improve as competition increases.

Still, as computer professionals, we are as well prepared to enter a new technical field as anyone in the public. We are already used to mind-numbing acronyms, arcane discussions of interfaces and protocols, and ever-growing quantities of data rates and capacities. We need to shoulder our packs and spend some time exploring the new territory so that we can do our job in representing the public. The average Joe and Jane depend on us-even though they may not know what's at stake.

Here's a carrot I can hold out to you: the more you learn about telecommunications, the better prepared you will be for a computer career in the near future. The two fields really are coming closer together.

Current Issues
If information is really important to people-an assertion with more subtle facets than one might think, as shown by Brennon Martin in his article in this issue, "Competition, Interconnection, and Universal Service"-we must be concerned about how information technology is diffused throughout the population, and what information it makes available. Thus, we have to look at the question of universal access, which has traditionally been limited to local telephone service, but which many people want to extend to include Internet services. A well-known study by the RAND corporation calls on the country to make electronic mail available to all residents, while the U.S. Telecommunications Act of 1996 mandates the FCC to determine what advanced services should be included in universal access. Martin's article casts a perhaps surprising new light on the issue.

We must also consider diversity of content and access to media for all points of view, an issue that public-interest groups have discussed for many decades in the area of television. Free speech, which is under attack in the most notorious clause of the Telecommunications Act-the Communications Decency Act-is one critical part of diversity.

Many of our traditional CPSR issues -- such as the right to privacy -- also apply to the telecommunications arena. For instance, cable modems and wireless radio could compete with telephone lines for network traffic, but both technologies require people in the neighborhood to share a medium. Therefore, the right to strong encryption is critical to technological progress.

A lot of new regulatory decisions, once the exclusive concern of a tiny community of experts, have suddenly blown up into major public issues. Take as examples two well-publicized news items of 1996-the petition of some long-distance phone companies to the FCC concerning the regulation of Internet telephony, and the petitions of several local phone companies that Internet Service Providers be charged long-distance access fees. The latter issue reached the mainstream press. Both drew criticism from the computer and access-provider industries, who were previously accustomed to regulatory agencies. Ironically, though the Telecom Act was meant to deregulate several industries, its effects are forcing us to deal with regulation more than ever before.

The Roundtables
While always maintaining an interest in its original issues-such as military use of computers, community networking, participatory design, and privacy-CPSR shifted a good deal of its energy to the National Information Infrastructure around the time that the Clinton administration was elected and Al Gore adopted the phrase information superhighway. While at first we pursued general principles, with hopes that the Federal Government would get heavily involved in setting standards and even providing funds, we soon realized that we would have to work with the existing infrastructure to promote the social goals that concern us. Thus, several CPSR members delved into the telecom industry.

We knew that several other nonprofits had entered this field ahead of us and had invaluable insights and contacts to offer. We've certainly worked with other organizations, like the Electronic Freedom Foundation, before. But our new venture in telecom required a tighter level of collaboration. Generally we tend to talk mainly with other "insiders" (those who understand the technology) and then, sporadically and episodically, to reach out to "outsiders" who run other nonprofits or represent the public interest in various ways. In telecom, we have found that the "outsiders" often understand the policy issues that concern technology as well as we do, or better.

The Center for Media Education, the Alliance for Community Media, and the Consumer Project on Technology were among the public-interest groups we needed to work closely with. Academic experts in communications for instance, at Emerson College in Boston and journalists with an interest in technology also played a part. In October 1993, together we formed the Telecommunications Policy Roundtable (TPR). The seven principles that drew the participants together, listed in our founding document, are that:

• All people should have affordable access to the information infrastructure.
• The information infrastructure should enable all people to effectively exercise their fundamental right to communicate.
• The information infrastructure must have a vital civic sector at its core.
• The information infrastructure should ensure competition among ideas and information providers.
• New technologies should be used to enhance the quality of work and to promote equity in the workplace.
• Privacy should be carefully protected and extended.
• The public should be fully involved in policy making for the information infrastructure.

The main TPR meets in Washington, DC, where most of the organizations involved have their offices. CPSR members William Drake and Craig Johnson represent us at DC meetings regularly. Among other accomplishments, Craig Johnson worked with me to develop a position paper criticizing the Telecom Act, which CPSR circulated widely to the media and Congresspeople during discussion of the bill. Jeffrey Hops of the Alliance for Community Media examines one new effort to bend the telecom industry to the public interest in "Turning the Tide: The 'Telecommunications Access Act' and the Future of Noncommercial Access," in this issue.

Another group called TPR/NE (Technology Policy Roundtable Northeast )met for a while in Boston, holding a set of well-attended public fora and forming a positive relationship with U.S. Representative Ed Markey, who has been promoting his credentials both as a political liberal and a friend of high technology. (An interview with Markey by Curtiss Priest appears in this issue.) Coralee Whitcomb and Hans Klein were key CPSR figures in TPR/NE.

A new TPR has just started in California, and is discussed in an article by Jeff Johnson and Chris Mays in this issue ("CPSR Joins the California Policy Roundtable").

Our participation in the TPR is an important success story for CPSR, which should lead us to strive for more alliances in the future, along with more visibility among the media, the public, and the legislators. Let me summarize the conclusions that I personally have drawn from TPR's history.

First, we should form more alliances. We can work together with groups, sharing their expertise-and offering them our energy and knowledge.

Second, we should express our positions boldly to the public. We have a reputation for careful research that must not be compromised, but on issues that really matter it is often necessary to move fast. We need to get to know the mainstream media and organizations that have contacts with these media. The Web is not yet a mass medium!

Third, we should give economic issues the same weight as such traditional political concerns as civil liberties. Money makes the world go round.

Finally, we should celebrate the special strengths that we have as a technical community with many politically sophisticated members. We can have an impact!

Andy Oram is an editor at O'Reilly & Associates and moderator of the CPSR Cyber Rights mailing list. He has been a CPSR member for about eight years.

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