[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 23 (Wednesday, March 6, 2002)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E283]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




      H.R. 1542, THE INTERNET FREEDOM AND BROADBAND DEPLOYMENT ACT

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. RICK BOUCHER

                              of virginia

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, March 6, 2002

  Mr. BOUCHER. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in full support of the Tauzin-
Dingell bill, H.R. 1542. Included as a part of that bill by means of 
the Manager's Amendment is an antitrust savings clause. This is an 
important addition to the bill and the authors, the Chairman of the 
Committee on Energy and Commerce and the Chairman of the Committee on 
the Judiciary, are to be congratulated on the development of this 
amendment.
  Regulatory and antitrust laws serve different functions. This 
amendment recognizes and embraces that fact as it preserves the 
antitrust laws and it indicates that these laws are not affected by 
H.R. 1542, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, nor the Communications 
Act of 1934. Second, and equally important, is the fact that it does 
not overrule nor affect any court case interpreting those laws 
including the Goldwasser case. The savings clause preserves this case 
law as well. Third, when the savings clause uses the term antitrust 
laws, such term includes antitrust defenses and immunities.
  Congress and the courts have recognized how ill-equipped antitrust 
courts are to serve as regulatory agencies. That's why the 1996 Act 
replaced judicial supervision under the AT&T consent decree with 
regulatory supervision of the process through which competition in the 
telecom industry would be jump-started. If we had simply abolished the 
AT&T consent decree and left all these details to antitrust enforcement 
agencies, private litigants, and the courts, five bad results would 
have occurred.
  First, the courts would have been flooded with regulatory tasks they 
are not suited to handle. It was a formidable task having one federal 
judge trying to micromanage the telecommunications industry under a 
consent decree. We did not repeat that experiment by authorizing many 
state and federal antitrust courts to undertake the same tasks.
  Second, the antitrust enforcement agencies, including the Department 
of Justice, would have been called on to duplicate, second guess, and 
perhaps contradict the telecommunications policy decisions Congress 
instead decided to entrust to the FCC and to the state commissions. We 
need the enforcement agencies to enforce the antitrust laws, not 
establish telecommunications policy or duplicate the regulatory 
expertise of other agencies.
  Third, incumbent carriers would not have been subject to many of the 
requirements they now face. By this bill, we limit regulation in the 
broadband segment of the industry, but we leave in place many 
regulatory requirements imposing on carriers duties they do not have 
under the antitrust laws.
  Fourth, as courts reached different and inconsistent conclusions in 
different cases, chaos would reign in an infrastructure industry 
critical to our economy and our nation's security.
  Fifth, we would bog down the deregulatory process through the 
protracted process of antitrust litigation in which cases often drag 
out for many years and, in some cases, decades.
  The 1996 Act assigns responsibility for working out the difficult 
details of interconnection and other transitional arrangements to 
private parties, state regulators, and the FCC. Antitrust laws are not 
expanded or diminished in any way by the 1996 Act or this Act. Among 
the antitrust laws preserved by the savings clause in the Managers' 
Amendment are the well-crafted and carefully applied judicial doctrines 
that govern the manner through which antitrust courts coordinate their 
activities with those of the regulatory agencies to avoid potential 
incompatibilities that might otherwise occur. We did not expand or 
diminish the antitrust laws, or the manner in which the courts apply 
those laws, when we enacted the Telecommunications Act of 1996. We will 
not do so now by enacting this Act.

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