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Since everybody important in Washington is in favor of a downsized federal government and reduced regulation, the latest version of the Telecommunications Act came as something of a surprise.
The bill does deregulate some things, such as cable TV rates. Under regulation, our struggling cable entrepreneurs have suffered the indignities of living in tiny 10,000-square-foot houses and donating only $80,000 or $100,000 to selected politicians. These terrible conditions will be righted.
The new law also allows more competition. Long-distance companies like AT&T, Sprint and MCI will be able to offer local phone service. Local providers like USWest and PTI will be able to offer long-distance service. Cable and cellular companies will jump into the fray.
The family dinner hour -- the time they pick for
telemarketing because that's when they might find someone
home to answer the phone -- will be one long session of
jumping up to just say no
to yet another
solicitor.
But they really are trying to protect family
values,
at least in theory. Every TV set sold in
America will have to be equipped with a V-chip which can
block reception of programs with someone labels as
offensive.
If you truly cared what your kids watched on TV, you'd
watch TV with them. Or you'd at least be around the house,
so that if your six-year-old's eyes were glued to adult
material like NYPD Blue
or CSPAN, you could order
some alternative programming.
So this V-chip is obviously designed for negligent and absentee parents who use the TV set as a babysitter. Yet we're all supposed to pay for it. This is fair?
The new Telecommunications Bill also addresses another major problem: porn on the Internet.
Why, just last week a neighborhood boy found an Internet
Service Provider which would give him credit, bought a fast
$200 modem, mastered the SLIP and PPP protocols, got
Trumpet Winsock to run for more than two minutes without
crashing, figured out how to run his news reader,
discovered that every posting in
alt.binary.naked.cheerleaders
was from religious
fanatics who warned him that he would boil in molten sulfur
for eternity because he looked in that forum, eventually
kept his connection going long enough (no mean feat with US
West lines) to download something that sounded saucy from
alt.binary.licentious.pictures
, and then discovered
that his viewer would handle only TIF and GIF files, not
the JPG format.
He threw his computer out the window, and it just missed hitting an innocent girl was who skate boarding down the sidewalk.
Clearly, society must be protected from this and similar menaces. Many boys don't get that far before acquiring repetitive motion strain injuries, and others, who finally manage to view a nude photo of Sandra Bullock, learn that it's a fake and develop cynical and distrustful attitudes which will forever prevent them from paying proper heed to teachers and employers.
Some might say that kids at computers, gazing at lurid images at home, are less of a problem there than they would be at the local cigar store, sneaking peeks at Penthouse and High Society when the clerk isn't looking.
But the sanctity of the home must be preserved, and the inevitable consequence of the current Telecommunications Act will be the federal Decency Enforcement Administration.
The new DEA will have to work closely with the Customs Service. Stopping the importation of television sets without, or with defective, V-chips is only part of the job, and the easy part at that.
The DEA will also have to examine every one of the millions of sites on the Internet. After all, someone in some backward country like Sweden or Denmark, where they actually let people look at any picture they want to look at, might make a lurid digitized image available.
Then every communication link to the United States will have to be monitored to see whether anybody in the land of the free downloads the explicit material. Once the DEA knows where it went, agents can drop by to see whether minors might gain access to this material.
And if so, someone will be in trouble. Will it be the initial provider in Denmark? Probably not -- U.S. jurisdiction doesn't extend that far. However, there might be a cooperative program in the future, with American military aircraft flying low with sensitive sensors to scan the low-intensity signals put out by computers. Bombs would then fall on the offenders.
Perhaps the communications carrier will be in trouble for being part of the process that made the stuff available to minors. But if we follow this logic very far, then Ryder Truck Rental will have to be a defendant in the Oklahoma City bombing trial.
That won't work, either, and the other possibilities don't seem all that promising. But I have faith. If there's a way to spend billions every year while accomplishing nothing except the oppression of American citizens, our protectors in Washington will find it.
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