FCC looks for valley support of broadband plan

Hoping to enlist Silicon Valley in the upcoming battle in Washington over whether the Federal Communications Commission can spark the creation of a national broadband system, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said Wednesday at Stanford University that the future health of the nation's democracy is at stake if a few "gatekeepers" control access to the Internet.

In a strongly worded talk preceding meetings with executives at Google and Apple, Commissioner Copps told members of the Churchill Club, a Silicon Valley business and technology forum, that the building of a national broadband system is like the canals, railroads, interstate highways and telephone and electrical systems built by earlier generations. "Increasingly, our national conversation — our news and information, our knowledge of one another — will depend on the Internet," said Commissioner Copps, who called a national high-speed Internet system linking most homes and businesses "America's great enabler" of job creation, education and solutions to problems like global warming.

In other remarks, Commissioner Copps said the FCC has a growing interest in the quality of journalism, hinting that he would support some sort of public subsidy for the beleaguered news business. Citing statistics showing a 50 percent decline in the newsgathering capacity of broadcast television, and a 30 percent decline in the newsgathering capacity of newspapers, Copps said, "new media has not found a model to replicate online what has been lost offline." "We don't have a model to support the level and the kind of journalism our democracy requires," he said, citing data that 95 percent of original newsgathering is done by newspapers or broadcast television, including much of the content available online. "This is one of the biggest problems the country faces right now."