John Kerry

I was privileged to serve for many years as the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

In my 30 years in the U.S. Senate, I have not seen an issue as complicated as the challenges posed by national security, energy, and climate change.

The threat of catastrophic climate change is not simply an academic concern for the future; it's already on us, happening now.

Climate change is an urgent challenge that we must confront with the seriousness it deserves.

Too often, our foreign policy debate has failed to reflect the importance, the connectedness, if you will, of this issue.

There is a striking overlap between the world's sources of energy and the world's sources of instability.

I am a strong believer in promoting the efficient use of spectrum, and wherever possible extending the benefits of such use to the public.

I'm hoping we'll persuade Senator Thune to come around to this free market idea.

So what you're saying is, that they may be blocked in one modality, but they're not really stopped from being able to access the market----

Well, should we accept that wireless carriers can dictate to a consumer what technology they have to--they can and can't use to access a network?

Is there adequate competition among those networks, that we could allow that?

Now I'm going to be very provocative--I'm going to be provocative here on purpose and be a little bit of a Devil's advocate, because I want to get at this, but not because somebody represents where I've landed here.

I see no compelling case why wireless networks should not offer consumers the same access opportunities as available from wired broadband networks.

Let me just say, also, I apologize, but I have a previous commitment that's going to require me to leave around 4 o'clock and Senator Klobuchar has graciously accepted to chair at that point in time.

For competitive purposes, you are blocking out certain applications.

Those can be very important to some of us here.

Congress should act so that the FCC promptly examines these practices and adopts rules to eliminate these harms.

Amazing things are happening with wireless technology.

I appreciate, Mr. Chairman, your holding this hearing and the opportunity to focus on this particular aspect of the industry.

Well, that's interesting. There are a lot more questions to exhaust this topic, obviously.

But truly there are four major carriers. And if you look at the penetration statistics, they're sharing 90 or so percent of the market, with Verizon's acquisition of Alltel.

Do we need to be thinking about the network itself, as a sort of, you know, public utility, in essence, and provide greater access to it, regardless of the innovative component that Mr. Roth appropriately talks about?

Why, in the American way of doing business, does a company not have the right to go sit down with somebody, assume a certain amount of risk together, enter an exclusive arrangement to assume that risk, and if they come up with a successful…

A light regulatory touch today will prevent the re-emerging duopoly in which two companies control all the customers, all the devices, all the prime spectrum, and become 'too big to fail.'

Today, there are about 270 million cell phone subscribers in America.