Joseph T. Burns: “this is a special day to those of us who serve on the Commerce Committee and have served on the Commerce Committee ever…”

“this is a special day to those of us who serve on the Commerce Committee and have served on the Commerce Committee ever since we have been in the Senate because today is the 10th anniversary of the Telecom Act of 1996. I want to talk about a bill I am introducing today as the Internet and Universal Service Act of 1996, or the NetUSA, if you will. When I first came here and went to work, I was very much interested in telecommunications. The big reason is in my State of Montana we have only 900,000 people but we have 148,000 square miles. I remind my colleagues, if you drew a straight line from Yaak, MT, to Alzada, MT, it is farther than it is from Chicago to Washington, DC. So we went to work in telecommunications for the simple reason we had to do something about distances, and we did. But it took almost 6 or 7 years before we came up with a bill that overhauled the old Telco Act of 1935. What we were trying to do is deal with the 1990s technology with a 1930 law and we found it almost impossible to do, so the whole act had to be rewritten. Since the Telecom Act, the only thing that is certain is change. With change, several trends have emerged, including the development of new technologies, industry consolidation and convergence, and product bundling. The pace of technological change has been astounding.…”