of my mentors who told his students that “news is what people want to keep hidden; everything

else is publicity.” That’s why two books are rattling the cages of powerful people

who would rather you not read them. Here’s the first one. "Captive Audience: The Telecom

Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age," by Susan Crawford. Read it and you’ll

understand why we Americans are paying much more for internet access than people in many

other countries and getting much less in return. That, despite the fact that our very own academics

and engineers, working with our very own Defense Department, invented the internet in the first

place.

Back then, the U.S. was in the catbird seat – poised to lead the world down this astonishing

new superhighway of information and innovation. Now many other countries offer their citizens

faster and cheaper access than we do. The faster high-speed access comes through fiber

optic lines that transmit data in bursts of laser light, but many of us are still hooked

up to broadband connections that squeeze digital information through copper wire. We’re stuck

with this old-fashioned technology because, as Susan Crawford explains, our government

has allowed a few giant conglomerates to rig the rules, raise prices, and stifle competition.

Just like standard oil in the first Gilded Age a century ago.

In those days, it was muckrakers like Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens rattling the

cages and calling for fair play. Today it’s independent thinkers like Susan Crawford.

The big telecom industry wishes she would go away, but she’s got a lot of people on

her side. In fact, if you go to the White House citizen’s petition site, you’ll

see how fans of "Captive Audience" are calling on the President to name Susan Crawford as

the next chair of the Federal Communications Commission. “Prospect” magazine named

her one of the “top ten brains of the digital future,” and Susan Crawford served for a

time as a special assistant to President Obama for science, technology and innovation. Right

now she teaches communications law at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law here in New

York City and is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. Susan Crawford, welcome.

SUSAN CRAWFORD:
Thank you so much.

BILL MOYERS:
“Captive Audience?” Who's the captive?

SUSAN CRAWFORD:
Us, all of us. What's happened is that these enormous telecommunications

companies, Comcast and Time Warner on the wired side, Verizon and AT&T on the wireless

side, have divided up markets, put themselves in the position where they're subject to no

competition and no oversight from any regulatory authority. And they're charging us a lot for

internet access and giving us second class access. This is a lot like the electrification

story from the beginning of the 20th century. Initially electricity was viewed as a luxury.

So when F.D.R. came in, 90 percent of farms didn't have electricity in America at the

same time that kids in New York City were playing with electric toys. And F.D.R. understood

how important it was for people all over America to have the dignity and self-respect and sort

of cultural and social and economic connection of an electrical outlet in their home. So

he made sure to take on the special interests that were controlling electricity then who

had divided up markets and consolidated just the way internet guys have today, he made

sure that we made this something that every American had.

BILL MOYERS:
But we are a long way from F.D.R., the New Deal and those early attitudes

toward industry. What makes you think that's relevant now when you come to the internet?

SUSAN CRAWFORD:
You know, this is an issue about which people have a lot of passion because

it touches them in their daily lives. “The Wall Street Journal” on the front page had

an article about kids needing to go to McDonald's to do their homework because they don't have

an internet connection at home. Parents around the country know that their kids can't get

an adequate education without internet access. You can't apply for a job these days without

going online. You can't get access to government benefits adequately, you can't start a business.

This feels to 300 million Americans like a utility, like something that's just essential

for life. And the issue of how it's controlled and how expensive it is and how few Americans

actually sign up for it is not really on the radar screen.

BILL MOYERS:
You describe this frankly as a crisis in communication with similarity,

you say, to the banking crisis and global warming. What makes it a crisis?

SUSAN CRAWFORD:
It's a crisis for us because we're not quite aware of the rest of the world.

Americans tend to think of themselves as just exceptional. And we're—

BILL MOYERS:
Well, we did invent the internet, didn't we?

SUSAN CRAWFORD:
We did, but that was generation one. Generation two, we're being left far

behind. And so all the new things that are going on in the world, America won't be part

of that unless we are able to communicate. So there's a darkness descending because of

this expensive and relatively slow internet access in America. We're also leaving behind

a third of Americans. A third of us.

BILL MOYERS:
In here you call it the digital divide. Describe that to me.

SUSAN CRAWFORD:
Well, here's the problem. For 19 million Americans, many in rural areas,

you can't get access to a high speed connection at any price, it's just not there. For a third

of Americans, they don't subscribe often because it's too expensive. So the rich are getting

gouged, the poor are very often left out. And this means that we're creating yet again

two Americas and deepening inequality through this communications inequality.

BILL MOYERS:
So is this why, according to numbers released by the Department of Commerce,

only four out of ten households with annual household incomes below $25,000 reported having

wired internet access at home compared with 93 percent of households with incomes exceeding

$100,000? These companies are not providing cheap enough access to the poor folks in this

country?

SUSAN CRAWFORD:
These are good American companies. Their profit motives though don't

line up with our social needs to make sure that everybody gets access. They're not in

the business of making sure that everybody has reasonably priced internet access. That's

how a utility functions. That's the way we need to treat this commodity. They're in the

business right now of finding rich neighborhoods and harvesting, just making more and more

money from the same number of people. They're doing really well at that. Comcast is now

a $100 billion company. They're bigger than McDonald's, they're bigger than Home Depot.

But they're not providing this deep social need of connection that every other country

is taking seriously.

BILL MOYERS:
And you make the point that the United States itself is beginning to experience

this digital divide in the world.

SUSAN CRAWFORD:
It's fair to say that the U.S. at the best is in the middle of the pack

when it comes to both the speed and cost of high speed internet access connections. So

in Hong Kong right now you can get a 500 megabit symmetric connection that's unimaginably fast

from our standpoint for about 25 bucks a month. In Seoul, for $30 you get three choices of

different providers of fiber in your apartment. And they come in and install in a day because

competition's so fierce. In New York City there's only one choice, and it's 200 bucks

a month for a similar service. And you can't get that kind of fiber connection outside

of New York City in many parts of the country. Verizon's only serving about 10 percent of

Americans. So let's talk about the wireless side for a moment, you know, the separate

marketplace that people use for mobility. In Europe you can get unlimited texting and

voice calls and data for about $30 a month, similar service from Verizon costs $90 a month.

That's a huge difference.

BILL MOYERS:
Why is there such a disparity there?

SUSAN CRAWFORD:
The difference in all of these areas is competition and government

policy. It's not magical. Without the intervention of the government there's no reason for these

guys to charge us anything reasonable or to make sure that everybody has services.

BILL MOYERS:
How do you explain that in the course of one generation, from the invention

of the internet in this country to falling way behind as you say the rest of the world

in our access to internet? How did that happen?

SUSAN CRAWFORD:
Beginning in the early 2000’s we believed that the magic of the market would

provide internet access to all Americans. That the cable guys would compete with the

phone guys who would compete with wireless and that somehow all of this ferment would

make sure that we kept up with the rest of the world. Those assumptions turned out not

to be true. It's much cheaper to upgrade a cable connection than it is to dig up a copper

phone line and replace it with fiber. So the cable guys who had these franchises in many,

most American cities, they are in place with a status quo network that 94 percent of new

subscriptions are going to. Everybody's signing up with their local cable incumbent. There

is not competition for 80 percent of Americans. They don't have a choice for a truly high

speed connection. It's just the local cable guy. Competition has just vanished.

BILL MOYERS:
Well, the 1996 Telecommunications Act was supposed to promote competition and

therefore protect the consumer by bringing prices down. That didn't happen?

SUSAN CRAWFORD:
That didn't happen because it's so much cheaper to upgrade the cable

line than it is to dig up the copper and replace it with fiber. The competition evaporated

because Wall Street said to the phone companies, "Don't do this, don't be in this business."

So you may think of Verizon and AT&T as wired phone companies, they're not. They've gone

into an entirely separate market which is wireless.

They're the monsters on the wireless side that control two thirds of that market. So

there's been a division. Cable takes wired, Verizon/AT&T take wireless. They're actually

cooperating. There's a federally blessed non-compete in the form of a joint marketing agreement

between Comcast and Verizon. And so the world is perfect for them, not so great for consumers

who are paying more than other people in the rest of the world for slower service.

BILL MOYERS:
Since the 1996 Telecommunications Act which I thought was going to lower the

price of our monthly cable bill, it's almost doubled.

SUSAN CRAWFORD:
Well, that's because Time Warner controls Manhattan. There's no competition.

The cable guys, long ago, something they call “the summer of love,” divided up—

BILL MOYERS:
“The summer of love?”

SUSAN CRAWFORD:
Yeah. They clustered their operations. It makes sense from their standpoint.

“You take San Francisco, I'll take Sacramento. You take Chicago, I'll take Boston.” And

so Comcast and Time Warner are these giants that never enter each other's territories.

BILL MOYERS:
You talk to certain people and they say, "Look, I don't know what this

is about. I have all the gizmos I want. I have a smart phone, I have a tablet,” And

they say, "What's the crisis? Because I have more access than I can use."

SUSAN CRAWFORD:
There are a lot of bright shiny objects that are confusing people about

the underlying market dynamics here. What people don't realize is that for this wireless

access you're paying too much and the coverage is too spotty. On the wired side, that's where

we're really being left behind. And here's the important tie to understand. A wireless

connection is just the last 50 feet of a wire. So fiber policy is really wireless policy.

These two things fit together. And if the whole country did an upgrade to cheap fiber

everywhere we'd get better connection for everybody. Right now though if a mayor wants

to do this for himself he'll be pummeled by the incumbents. In almost 20 states in America

it's either illegal or very difficult for municipalities to make this decision for themselves.

BILL MOYERS:
In North Carolina a couple of years ago lobbyists for Time Warner persuaded

the state legislature to make it almost impossible, virtually impossible for municipalities to

get their own utility, right?

SUSAN CRAWFORD:
That's exactly right. And so now North Carolina, after being beaten

up by the incumbents is at the near the bottom of broadband rankings for the United States.

BILL MOYERS:
And what's the practical consequence of that?

SUSAN CRAWFORD:
All those students in North Carolina, all those businesses that otherwise

would be forming, they don't have adequate connections in their towns to allow this to

happen. They've got-- they're subject to higher and higher pricing. They're being gouged.

BILL MOYERS:
Your book did underscore for me why this is so important to democracy,

to the functioning of our political system, to our role as a self-governing free people.

Talk about that a moment. Why do you see this so urgently in terms of our practically dysfunctional

democracy today?

SUSAN CRAWFORD:
We need to be able to speak to each other effectively and effectively

to government. We need to empower our citizens to feel dignified and ready to cope in the

21st century. Having a communications system that knits the country together is not just

about economic growth. It's about the social fabric of the country. And a country that

feels as if it can move together and trust each other is one that is more democratic.

As a matter of national policy we have forced other countries to talk about the importance

of internet access, foreign policy we're great at saying, "Make sure internet is everywhere."

Domestically, for some reason, we haven't done so well. So I see internet access as

the heart of a democratic society.

BILL MOYERS:
You use that merger of Comcast and NBCUniversal as the window in your book

into what this power can do to the aspirations of a democratic internet.

BRIAN WILLIAMS on NBCNightlyNews:
Federal regulators today approved the purchase by

Comcast of a majority stake in NBCUniversal from General Electric […] This merger will

create a $30 billion media company with cable, broadcast, internet, motion picture and theme

park components. The deal is expected to close by the end of the month.

BILL MOYERS:
You say that the merger between Comcast and NBCUniversal represented a new

frightening moment in U.S. regulatory history. How so?

SUSAN CRAWFORD:
Comcast is not only the nation's largest broadband distributor with

tens of millions of customers, it also now owns and controls one of the four media conglomerates