Jack Fields: “I was given the charge by our Speaker and the chairman of the full committee to move our country relative to…”

“I was given the charge by our Speaker and the chairman of the full committee to move our country relative to telecommunication policy into the 21st century, not to crawl back into the 1950's. These rules were written when I was 2 years old, when President Eisenhower was President, and many Americans did not even own a television set. 1230 ABC, NBC, CBS were the only viewing options. There was no CNN, no HBO, no ESPN. Individual American citizens were not even allowed to own satellite dishes without government authorization. That was real media concentration. Today's media world is fiercely competitive. Viewers have never had more choices with 100 cable networks, direct broadcast satellites, a fourth network and the beginnings of a fifth and a sixth network. H.R. 1555 unleashes the local telephone companies with combined revenues exceeding $100 billion annually to compete in the television video business. The rules that were appropriate when black and white television sets were the state-of-the-art technology are not appropriate today. The Committee on Commerce dusted off the 40-year-old broadcast ownership rules. We reviewed them. We revised them to fit today's highly competitive telecommunications world.”