William Tauzin: “several years ago in this House we debated a thing called program access in connection with the cable industry. It was a…”

“several years ago in this House we debated a thing called program access in connection with the cable industry. It was a grand debate. It produced an override of a veto on that cable bill that year. But more importantly, what it produced for America was competition in the cable industry. It produced for America the direct broadcast television system [DBS] that is now providing cable programming to millions of Americans who did not live within reach of a cable system. It is providing competition in cable prices and cable programming to millions of Americans who were limited before the advent of [DBS] to buying their programming from a single monopoly supplier. We celebrated then a small victory for competition and for consumers. Has it worked? It has worked marvelously. There is finally real competition in cable programming. Consumers enjoy more choices. There are better products and better prices. We have just begun to see the benefits of that competition today. Today is a grand celebration of that notion of competition. Today, in a bipartisan way, we unleash the spirit of competition in all forms of telecommunications services, from telephones to computers, to services dealing with video programming, and data services to interexchange services that are going to link us as Americans together as one like never before and give us access to the world and the world access to us as never before.”