The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“TELECOMMUNICATIONS AND TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES AND CONSUMER PROTECTION” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Justice was published in the Senate section on pages S8172-S8175 on Dec. 20, 2017.
The Department is one of the oldest in the US, focused primarily on law enforcement and the federal prison system. Downsizing the Federal Government, a project aimed at lowering taxes and boosting federal efficiency, detailed wasteful expenses such as $16 muffins at conferences and board meetings.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
TELECOMMUNICATIONS AND TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES AND CONSUMER PROTECTION
Mr. FRANKEN. Mr. President, I rise to deliver the second in a series of floor speeches that I offer as I close out my time in the Senate.
This afternoon, I want to talk about Americans' relationship with telecommunications and technology companies and what that means for their access to essential services and for their privacy.
When I entered the Senate in July of 2009, then-Majority Leader Harry Reid asked me to serve on the Judiciary Committee. I pointed out that there are a lot of lawyers in the Senate and that I wasn't one of them, but he said he needed Members with my perspective on the committee. I wondered how my background could possibly serve me on Judiciary, but it did--almost immediately--when in December of that year, Comcast announced its intention to acquire NBCUniversal.
I happened to know a lot about the effects of media consolidation because I used to work in media. When powerful corporations are permitted to acquire other powerful corporations, it is the American consumers who are left facing higher prices, fewer choices, and even worse service from their telecommunications providers. I questioned why an already powerful company should be allowed to get even bigger and thus extract more leverage over consumers and the businesses reliant on its platform.
It was through my work on Comcast and NBCUniversal that I learned about the rising costs of internet, phone, and TV services, as well as the importance of preserving net neutrality. I also became interested in how giant telecommunications companies, as well as ever-evolving tech companies, were treating the massive troves of user data they were collecting on a perpetual basis.
I believe consumers have a fundamental right to know what information is being collected about them. I believe they have a right to decide whether they want to share that information and with whom they want to share it and when. I believe consumers have a right to expect that companies that store their personal information will store it securely.
I also believe all Americans deserve affordable access to high-
quality telecommunications services--services they depend on to communicate with the world, get an education, and find a job. I believe the internet should remain the open platform for innovation, economic growth, and freedom of expression it has always been.
Perhaps it was the complex nature of these issues or even the financial incentive to turn a blind eye, but when I came to the Senate, very few Members of Congress were talking about corporate consolidation, commercial privacy, or net neutrality--issues that have gained much deserved attention in more recent years. Whatever the reason for other Members' hesitance, I felt it was incumbent upon me to get into the weeds on these issues so I could be a leader in the Senate and ultimately address the concerns of ordinary Minnesotans.
That is why, when the interests of the American consumers have clashed with the desires of powerful telecommunications and technology companies, I have always tried to put the public first and to fight on their behalf by shedding light on corporate abuses and using all the tools at my disposal to curb them.
Again, it is through my work on the Judiciary Committee--and, more specifically, my work on media and technology policy--that I believe my perspective from my previous career has been of most value.
Comcast's proposal to acquire NBCU immediately made me uncomfortable because I had seen their motives for this deal before. In 1993, during my 13th season at ``Saturday Night Live,'' the Big Three networks--NBC, CBS, and ABC--pressured Congress to change the rules that had previously prevented them from owning any of the shows they aired in prime time. The purpose of the rules had been to prevent the networks from prioritizing their own shows over others or otherwise harming competing programming.
Unsurprisingly, after the rules were repealed, the networks--contrary to their guarantees and assurances they had given Congress--began giving the shows they owned preferential treatment. At the time,
``Seinfeld,'' which aired on NBC, was not owned by NBC and had been produced before the rules had changed--was the No. 1 show on television, which made the Thursday night timeslot following
``Seinfeld'' the most valuable real estate on television. I watched as shows that eventually wound up in that premium location were all owned, at least in part, by NBC.
So when I became a Senator, one of the first major deals I opposed was Comcast's acquisition of NBCUniversal. As in the case of AT&T's current bid to buy Time Warner, this deal was about giving one company the ability to control both the programming and the pipes that carry it. I knew from my time in media that a combined Comcast-NBCUniversal would have strong incentives to favor its own programming over that of others and restrict competing distributors from accessing that programming. I knew these incentives would hurt competing content creators, inhibit the free flow of information, and ultimately harm consumers.
Unfortunately, I was not wrong. In the years after its acquisition of NBCUniversal, Comcast repeatedly violated the terms of its agreements with the FCC and the Department of Justice, favoring its own news programming over its competitors in Comcast's channel lineup and failing to live up to its promises regarding offering affordable standalone broadband, racial diversity in programming--they did not live up to their promises there--and online video distribution. Because merger conditions are extremely difficult and costly to enforce, competition and consumers were harmed in the process.
Comcast's behavior in the wake of acquiring NBCUniversal was one of the major reasons I then opposed its proposal to turn around and buy Time Warner Cable a couple years later. It was also one of the major reasons I believe that later deal was ultimately dropped after objections from the FCC and the Department of Justice.
For a long time in the Senate, it was a lonely battle. For over a year, I was the only Senator to oppose Comcast's proposals to buy Time Warner Cable--a deal that would have given the combined company 57 percent of the broadband market--but advocates and ordinary citizens raised their voices, and together we were able to stop the deal.
Most recently, I have led my colleagues in scrutinizing AT&T's proposed acquisition of Time Warner, and I have once again called on regulators to move to block the deal for the inevitable harm it will cause to competition and consumers.
I have been proud to lead these efforts, and I leave here in a much different environment than when I arrived. I know there are strong voices in the Senate that will carry on the fight when I am gone.
These efforts to slow down and halt media consolidation are part of a very important, larger development we have seen in our country. In recent years, there has been a resurgence in the American public's--
and, in turn, Congress's--interest in combating corporate consolidation.
When I first entered the Senate, I wasn't sure most Americans understood what was at stake when these powerful companies wanted to combine. Vertical integration and antitrust laws sounded like obscure, almost boring, topics, but more and more Americans are getting educated about these issues, and more and more Members of Congress are working to get Washington focused on how they affect the lives of real people.
Just look at the fight for net neutrality. For many of the same reasons that I opposed Comcast's acquisition of NBCUniversal, I have long supported strong net neutrality rules to ensure that the internet remains a level playing field where everyone can participate on equal footing, free from discrimination by large internet service providers like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T.
Net neutrality preserves the internet as the engine for innovation that it has always been and allows businesses of all sizes to thrive--
even when they are up against the largest, most profitable corporations. Here is just one example I found useful in explaining net neutrality:
In 2005, three guys set up shop over a pizzeria in a strip mall in San Mateo, CA, where they launched the now-ubiquitous YouTube. Video-
sharing websites were in their infancy, but these guys already faced competition from something that preceded it called Google Video, but Google Video wasn't very good. Because of net neutrality, YouTube was able to compete with Google Video on a level playing field. The giant internet service providers treated YouTube's videos the same as they did Google's, and Google couldn't pay them to gain an unfair advantage, like a fast lane into consumer homes.
They were treated the same, neutrally. The content was neutral--net neutrality. People really liked YouTube. They preferred YouTube to Google Video, and YouTube thrived. In fact, in 2006, Google bought it for stock valued at $1.65 billion. That is a nice chunk for three guys over a pizzeria in San Mateo.
It is not just tech companies and small businesses that rely on open internet. In a submission to the FCC in 2014, a coalition that includes Visa, Bank of America, UPS, and Ford explained that ``every retailer with an online catalogue, every manufacturer with online product specifications, every insurance company with online claims processing, every bank offering online account management, every company with a website--every business in America interacting with its customers online is dependent upon an open Internet.'' I have repeated this quote on the floor and at rallies time and time again over the years because I think it perfectly exemplifies the importance of this issue.
Preserving net neutrality is only controversial for the few deep-
pocketed entities that stand to financially gain without it.
If FCC Chairman Pai ultimately has his way, we will be entering a digital world where the powerful outrank the majority, a world where a handful of multibillion-dollar companies have the power to control how users get their information, and a world where the deepest pockets can pay for a fast lane while their competitors stall in the slow lane.
For nearly 9 years, I have been calling net neutrality the free speech issue of our time because it embraces our most basic constitutional freedoms. And ironically, the kind of civic participation that has aspired so many of us in recent months--and has effected real change, like in the fight for net neutrality and the successful efforts to save the Affordable Care Act--has depended in no small part on a free and open internet.
In 2015, the FCC's vote to reclassify broadband providers as common carriers under title II of the Communications Act didn't just mean good things for net neutrality; it also had important implications for consumer privacy. It gave the agency the authority and the responsibility to implement rules to protect Americans' privacy by giving consumers greater control of their personal data that is collected and used by their broadband providers. That was a big win. Republicans didn't see it that way. One of the first things they did this Congress was to repeal those rules, which was a huge blow to Americans' right to privacy.
For my part, I have long believed that Americans have a fundamental right to privacy. I believe they deserve both transparency and accountability from the companies that have the capacity to trade on the details of their lives. And should they choose to leave personal information in the hands of those companies, they certainly deserve to know that their information is being safeguarded to the greatest degree possible. This transparency and accountability should come from all the companies that have access to Americans' sensitive information. This includes internet service providers like Comcast and AT&T but also edge providers like Google, Facebook, and Amazon.
In 2011, I served as chair for the inaugural hearing of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law--a subcommittee that I founded after it became abundantly clear that our Nation's privacy laws had failed to keep pace with rapidly evolving technologies.
When people talked about protecting their privacy when I was growing up, they were talking about protecting it from the government. They talked about unreasonable searches and seizures, about keeping the government out of their bedrooms. They talked about whether the government was trying to keep tabs on the books they read or the rallies they attended. Over the last 40 or 50 years, we have seen a fundamental shift in who has our information and what they are doing with it. That is not to say that we still shouldn't be worried about protecting ourselves from government abuses, but now we also have relationships with large corporations that are obtaining, storing, sharing and in many cases selling enormous amounts of our personal information.
When the Constitution was written, the Founders had no way of anticipating the new technologies that would evolve in the coming centuries. They had no way of anticipating the telephone, for example, and so the Supreme Court ruled over 40 years ago that a wiretap constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment. The Founders had no idea that one day the police would be able to remotely track your movements through a GPS device, and so the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that this was also a search that required court approval. All of this is a good thing. Our laws need to reflect the evolution of technology and changing expectations of American society. This is why the Constitution is often called a living document. But we have a long way to go to get to the point where our modern laws are in line with modern technology.
My goal for the subcommittee was to help members understand both the benefits and privacy implications of emerging technologies; to educate the public and raise awareness about how their data is being collected, used, and shared; and, if necessary, to legislate to fill gaps in the law. When politics prevented legislation, I repeatedly pressed companies--many of them more than once--to be more transparent about how they were treating their customers' private information, including users' location data, web-browsing histories, and even their finger and face prints.
As consumer awareness has evolved, these companies have taken important steps to improve transparency of their use of Americans' personal information. But unfortunately, accumulating massive troves of information isn't just a side project they can choose to halt at any given time; for many of them, it is their whole business model. We are not their customers; we are their product.
Recently, we have seen just how scary this business model can be. In October of this year, the Judiciary Committee examined Russia's manipulation of social media during the 2016 campaign, and both the public and Members of Congress were shocked to learn the outsized role that the major tech companies play in so many aspects of our lives, based primarily on the mass collection of personal information and complex algorithms that are shrouded in secrecy. Not only do these companies guide what we see, read, and buy on a regular basis, but their dominance--specifically in the market of information--now requires that we consider their role in the integrity of our democracy. Unfortunately, this fall's hearings demonstrated that they may not be up to the challenge that they have created for themselves.
The size of these companies is not--in isolation--the problem, but I am extremely concerned about these platforms' use of Americans' personal information to further solidify their market power and consequently extract unfair conditions from the content creators and innovators who rely on their platforms to reach consumers. As has become alarmingly clear in recent months, companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon have unprecedented power to guide Americans' access to information and potentially shape the future of journalism. It should go without saying that such power comes with great responsibility.
Everyone is currently and rightfully focused on Russian manipulation of social media, but as lawmakers, it is incumbent upon us to ask the broader questions: How did big tech come to control so many aspects of our lives? How is it using our personal information to strengthen its reach and its bottom line? Are these companies engaging in anticompetitive behavior that restricts the free flow of information in commerce? Are they failing to take simple precautions to respect our privacy and to protect our democracy? And finally, what role should these companies play in our lives, and how do we ensure transparency and accountability from them going forward?
Modern technology has fundamentally altered the way we live our lives, and it has given us extraordinary benefits. As these companies continue to grow and evolve, challenges like those we have recently confronted in the Judiciary Committee will only grow and evolve with them. So we must now muster the will to meaningfully address the tough questions related to competition, privacy, and ultimately the integrity of our democracy.
I will not be here to ask those questions. I will do what I can to find the answers from the outside, but it is my colleagues in the Senate who must prioritize them going forward. There is simply too much at stake. I know that they will do so with the help of a tireless advocacy community and the brilliant minds who have long contemplated these incredibly complex issues and ensured that lawmakers pay attention. And more importantly, they will do so with the support and encouragement of the American people.
I have witnessed significant highs and significant lows in the fight to protect consumers' rights, but the most important lesson I have learned along the way is that ordinary Americans can wield extraordinary power when they raise their voices. For this reason and despite significant setbacks in recent months, I know that it is the public's interests that can ultimately prevail.
Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Lee). The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
____________________
