Scott Klug: “the rule we have before us this afternoon and soon the bill itself that will follow has to do with changing law, and…”

“the rule we have before us this afternoon and soon the bill itself that will follow has to do with changing law, and changing law that has affected the communications industry since the 1930's, but it is not just about changing law. It is also, I think, in many ways about fundamentally changing a mind-set, because for nearly 60 years in this country we have run communications based on a philosophy which said the bureaucracy, that the Government set prices, that the Government restricted access and restricted competition, and fundamentally it was the Government picking winners and defining losers. This bill and this rule that precedes the bill will usher in a new era of competition where the market instead will pick winners and losers, and ultimately the major winner in all of this will be consumers. It is the way that consumers won when we deregulated the airline industry in 1978, and it is the way that consumers won when we deregulated the trucking industry back in 1980. Those changes have resulted in savings of hundreds of billions of dollars to the economy. Obviously it helped the economy grow; this bill, at its roots, is in many ways a jobs bill as well, because it is a jobs bill based fundamentally on innovation and on new products. This bill is also about choice. It used to be we only had one long-distance phone company in this country. Today there are thousands of them.…”