Gordon Smith On Stuck Telecom Bill: Help!

GORDON SMITH ON STUCK TELECOM BILL: HELP!
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
Sen Gordon Smith (R-OR) told a Media Institute luncheon Wednesday that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) is trying to help get the 60 votes needed to bring the communications reform bill to a floor vote (essentially to make it filibuster-proof), but said that likely won't happen, if at all, until a lame duck session after the November elections. If the bill doesn't pass, he said, the country will fall behind in broadband deployment to the tune of a trillion dollars and a million-plus jobs lost. "We need your help, we need 60 votes," he told the crowd of media executives at The Media Institute. Asked why the network neutrality supporters had been so successful in impeding the bill, given they had been outspent by the telcos on lobbying, Sen Smith said he could only speculate, but pointed to the populist argument that the Internet, that came to us "almost by accident" and had become available virtually for free. They don't want to change that. I'd love everything to be free too," he said, but argued that if the country is to get to the "next level" of broadband, and get it to more and more Americans, "you allow the marketplace to work. If you say right up front you can't charge this or you can't discriminate as to customers who bring volume, then you take a tremendous incentive away from investment." Republicans have already threatened to make a campaign issue out of the bill's stalemate, pitching it as Democrats standing in the way of broadband deployment and price and service competition to cable.
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