Michael Copps

Party platforms can be sleepy affairs. In recent years, platform writing too often became an exercise of box-checking to “reach out and touch” as many interest groups as possible so everyone felt involved, with an anodyne sentence or two thrown in so these interests felt included. Long on generalities and short on specifics, platforms in recent years were routinely adopted at the party’s convention—and then promptly forgotten.

Pretend you’re a journalist (if you really are one, ignore that but read on anyhow) and someone calls and says “I’ve got a good and timely story that I think your readers/listeners would like to know about. There is a government agency that has both the authority and the responsibility to help clean up our broken big-money election campaigns—and it is refusing to do its job.” Let me explain.

When Comcast tried to merge with Time Warner Cable last year, reaction was swift and negative. Not many people liked the idea of America’s largest and least loved cable company getting any bigger; the deal collapsed after hundreds of thousands of Americans spoke out and federal regulators signaled that they would not let it go forward.

Of course I was thrilled this past April when the Federal Communications Commission indicated it was leaning against approval of the proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger. Reading their tarot cards, the companies promptly dropped their anti-competitive proposal. This was a real public interest victory, made possible by widespread grassroots opposition and an FCC that was listening to the people. (And it followed closely on the heels of the FCC’s hard-won and vastly-improved net neutrality rules for an Open Internet.)

It’s time for the friends of an Open Internet and of a communications ecosystem that serves the needs of democracy to make sure our issues are part of the 2016 campaign dialogue. These issues won’t get the visibility they deserve unless we work to put them there, and if we fail in this, we will have ourselves to blame for the policy decisions that are made once the elections are over.

We live in an exceptional country, we like to tell ourselves. If that’s really so, why are we letting it crumble around us? Let’s take a quick and random look around.