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REMARKS OF FCC COMMISSIONER MICHAEL J. COPPS
ON RECEIVING THE PUBLIC POLICY AWARD
19th BIENNIAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
TELECOMMUNICATIONS FOR THE DEAF, INCORPORATED
AUSTIN, TEXAS
JUNE 2, 2011
This is truly a special day for me.  It brings back so many memories of our work 
together over the past decade.  It’s hard for me to believe that it was ten years ago that we 
were together in Sioux Falls, South Dakota at the 14th Biennial TDI Conference. I was a 
newly-minted Member of the FCC, and addressing that gathering was my first speech as 
a Commissioner. Since then, I have been privileged to work with so many of you in this 
room in trying to get your needs and your input before the FCC and to develop policies 
that could make a difference in your lives and all of our lives.  Claude Stout and I became 
immediate good friends the moment we met and it was at a small dinner that he arranged 
in Sioux Falls the night before my speech that I first started to really understand both the 
depth of the challenges confronted by so many people in our deaf and hard-of-hearing 
communities, but also to realize the opportunity we had to apply the wonders of new 
technologies to help overcome those challenges.  Working with folks like Claude and 
Roy Miller and Joe Duarte and Fred Weiner and Carol Sliney and so many more in this 
audience and throughout the community has been for me the most inspiring and 
rewarding part of my time at the Commission.
And what an honor it is to be receiving the Karen Peltz-Strauss Public Policy 
Award—from none other than Karen Peltz-Strauss herself!  Karen is one of my heroes.  I 
relied heavily on her in my early days as a Commissioner before she went out to work 
directly in the community, and I urged Chairman Genachowski to try to entice her back 
when he became Chairman—and he did.  She and Joel Gurin and Greg Hlibok and their 
team are so great to work with.  Here’s how I work with Karen.  Inevitably—each and 
every time—when an idea or proposal regarding your issues comes up, the first question I 
ask is: “What does Karen think of this?”  If it’s a “go” for Karen, it’s just about always a 
“go” for me.   She’ll know the history, the substance, the practical impact, the cost and 
the right thing to do.  Karen has worked for 25 years to make sure that the disabilities 
communities are not left behind as technology advances—ensuring that accessibility 
needs are met when it comes to communicating over the telephone, watching television 
and, today’s challenge, accessing and using broadband. Our agency is such a better place 
than it would otherwise be thanks to her expertise and her commitment to you. So I thank 
her for that, for all the great advice and counsel she has shared with me, and for 
presenting me with this wonderful Award this morning.  It is something I will always 
cherish.
I’ve been thinking in recent days about what a long way we’ve come in these ten 
years! Back then we were just at the dawn of the Twenty-first Century —talking about 
the potential of advanced communications services and technologies to change our lives 
for the better but still only on the cusp of actually experiencing their transformative 
power. Today most of us have seen that power first-hand, many of us have grown to 
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depend upon these amazing services and technologies, and we understand that access to 
broadband—both fixed and mobile—is vitally important to our lives.  It’s important to 
our lives as individuals because the door to opportunity is increasingly online.  It’s where 
jobs are found and secured, it’s where companies recruit.  It’s important to our health as 
telehealth and telemedicine become important components of how we care for ourselves.  
It’s important to how we educate ourselves and our kids for the competitive world in 
which we all live. Broadband is already playing a huge role in education but we haven’t 
seen anything yet—the growth will be both phenomenal and transformative.  
Broadband is also central to the future of our country.  There is almost no 
challenge we face that does not have a broadband component as an integral part of its 
successful resolution.  Job creation comes immediately to mind—both helping people 
find the jobs that are out there, but also creating new jobs through the deployment, 
adoption and utilization of this expansive information infrastructure.  Few people would 
deny that our country faces competitive commercial challenges from other countries 
more severe than anything we have encountered since we were a colony a quarter of a 
millennium ago.  Things don’t look as assured for our future as once they did.  Our 
economic future comes with no guarantees—only challenges to the preeminence we 
enjoyed for so long.  But broadband can help.  It can help us decrease, for example, our 
costly dependence on foreign fuels.  It can also help us put the brakes on the degradation 
of our environment.  And it can do so much more.  So we need to grab onto these new 
tools of the Twenty-first Century and put them to work for ourselves and for our kids 
who are growing up in a very different world from the one into which you and I were 
born.  The bottom line is this: participation in our economy, our society, and even our 
democracy increasingly requires high speed Internet access.
For broadband to work it has to be available to all and be utilized by all.  Its 
premise is accessibility to everyone—no matter who they are, where they live, or the 
particular circumstances of their individual lives. Access to high-speed, high-value 
broadband is a defining right of this new age.  Let’s treat it as a civil right because that’s 
how it should be seen.  If we don’t do that, the differences that already divide America 
will actually grow and the New Digital Age will instead become the Growing Digital 
Divide Age.  What a tragedy that would be—to have within our grasp the most dynamic, 
liberating and opportunity-creating information technology in all of history—and let it be 
used to erect new barriers to inclusion rather than to break down the old.  That’s why we 
all need access to affordable broadband and an open Internet.
Earlier this year, we marked the 15th Anniversary of the Telecommunications 
Act. Vice President Al Gore’s words at the signing of that bill back in 1996 really 
captured the true goal of that landmark legislation. He said then, and it still resonates 
today, “I firmly believe that the proper role of government in the development of the 
information superhighway is to promote and achieve at every stage of growth, at every 
level of operation, at every scale, the public interest values of democracy, education, and 
economic and social well-being for all of our citizens. If we do not see to it that every 
project, every network, every system addresses the public interest at the beginning, then 
when will it be addressed?” 
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The people I see in this audience today have been leading the way to make that 
vision a reality, by ensuring that the 54 million Americans with disabilities can share in 
the benefits of the Digital Age. New technologies and new media certainly hold great 
promise—but optimism alone doesn’t get the job done.  Hard work gets it done.  You are 
doing that work.  Our job at the FCC is to help ensure that every American with a 
disability has access to functionally equivalent communications services—a mandate 
that, if it’s going to work, must evolve as rapidly as the technological innovation we see 
going on all around us.
That is why I was so thrilled to be in the White House watching President Obama 
sign the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act into law last 
October. Thanks to your tireless advocacy and to true champions on Capitol Hill 
including my friends Congressman Ed Markey, Congressman Henry Waxman, Senator 
Jay Rockefeller and Senator Mark Pryor, this sweeping piece of communications and 
civil rights legislation is now the law of the land, and it’s going to make a world of 
difference. The statute tasks the FCC with quick and far-reaching action to expand 
opportunity for persons with disabilities. And I am happy to report that the FCC is hard at 
work following up to implement the mandates of this historic legislation.
Allow me to share with you some of the areas where we’ve already started 
moving forward:
· Two months ago, we announced the creation of a two-year pilot program to get the 
Deaf-Blind Equipment Distribution Program up-and-running. The Twenty-first 
Century Act allocated $10 million annually from the TRS fund for this nationwide 
effort. The goal here is to make communications technologies and services accessible 
to low-income individuals who are deaf-blind. 
· The FCC has issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to implement the express 
mandate of Congress to reinstate and modify the video description rules that were 
originally adopted by the Commission in 2000.  Video description, which provides 
important—sometimes essential—information that is otherwise conveyed to the 
viewing audience only visually, makes video programming more accessible to the 
blind and visually impaired. Some broadcasters have provided this service of their 
own accord since the Commission’s rules were overturned in court more than a 
decade ago, and I salute those that have done so for their leadership.  The 
requirements of the new law will greatly expand the amount of programming that is 
video-described. The Commission must take action to reinstate video description 
rules before the end of the year to meet Congress’ deadline. You know, sometimes 
there is just no substitute for a good deadline!
· The Commission is also working to craft rules that ensure that persons with 
disabilities are able fully to use advanced communications services, equipment and 
networks. This hard-won requirement of accessibility was first enshrined in Section 
255 of the 1996 Act, and even before passage of the Twenty-First Century Act the 
current Commission was already digging into some of these issues, in particular 
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focusing on the need to expand disability access to wireless telecommunications. But 
now the Commission has the express statutory mandate to expand that requirement 
beyond traditional telecommunications services like voice telephony and into the 
world of advanced offerings like the mobile devices that so many of us use to go 
online, watch video, send text messages—and, sometimes, even to make a plain old 
telephone call, too!
· Two advisory committees have been set up by the new law—the Video Programming 
Accessibility Advisory Committee and the Emergency Access Advisory 
Committee—and they have been meeting regularly and working toward issuing 
recommendations for FCC action:
o The Emergency Access Advisory Committee, for its part, has already 
completed a national survey of persons with disabilities regarding emergency 
calling. We look forward to its recommendations about what policies and 
practices we can put in place to achieve equal access to emergency services 
for individuals with disabilities as we migrate to Next Generation 911 that will 
be capable of receiving emergency calls via voice, text, and video.
o And the Video Programming Accessibility Advisory Committee is developing 
recommendations on a host of critical issues central to the new law: closed 
captioning of Internet programming previously captioned on television; video 
description of television programming; accessible emergency information for 
people with vision disabilities; compatibility of accessibility features and new 
video programming devices; and accessible user interfaces on video 
programming devices.
I know many of you here today were instrumental in getting this legislation 
passed in the first place. You did a great job!  And now that the action has shifted over to 
the FCC, you have brought your talents to the advisory Committees and have already 
given us valuable comment on our proposed rules.  I can tell you this for sure: the 
successful implementation of the law requires that we continue this close and ongoing 
collaboration with you.  So I encourage you to continue to participate actively as these 
proceedings move forward at the FCC. It’s important for this particular law.  And it’s 
important for all the things we can do together in the years ahead.  As my old boss 
Senator Fritz Hollings often cautioned: decisions made without you are usually decisions 
against you.
The FCC needs to be constantly vigilant that we are holding up our end of this 
bargain, too. During my years at the Commission, I have tried to open our doors to the 
full panoply of American stakeholders, so that the Commission isn’t just hearing from the 
biggest business interests with their armies of lawyers and lobbyists, but also from 
consumers and citizens who are the overwhelming majority of folks who must live with 
the consequences of what we do in Washington. There will always be more work to be 
done on this outreach score, but I believe our current Commission has made important 
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strides in this area, and I’m excited to see the level of collaboration we are engaging in 
with the disabilities communities. 
We need to hear from you not just on the items related to implementation of the 
Twenty-first Century Act, but to sustain a dialogue across the whole wide range of 
telecommunications and media issues before the FCC. For example, in the coming 
months, the Commission is going to be very focused on reform of our Universal Service 
programs. looking to tackle not only challenges hindering the deployment of broadband 
networks but also the barriers that stand in the way of millions of Americans adopting 
broadband service in their homes. As many as one-third of the American people have not 
adopted high-speed broadband at home—and we know the disparities are even starker for 
Americans with disabilities, with one recent survey showing that only 54% of Americans 
with disabilities use the Internet. And we know too that unemployment rates are much 
higher among the disabled. These are exactly the kind of underserved populations that the 
Lifeline program—which provides discounted phone service to low-income 
households—is designed to assist. As we work to reorient this program to support 
broadband and to provide the services every American needs to be competitive in the 
Twenty-first Century, we need your ongoing input so that we can maximize the benefits 
for the disabilities communities.
We also need your valuable input as the Commission works to strengthen the 
VRS program.  This program has been a critical communications link for the deaf and 
hard of hearing and we cannot allow abuses that we know exist in the program to threaten 
its long-term viability.  The Commission has made some tough decisions and has more 
on its plate.  I am committed to moving forward with reform of the program in a way that 
protects the interests of consumers who rely on VRS every day to reach their colleagues, 
friends, and loved ones.
Finally, allow me to address something we need to think more about in the context 
of our changing communications landscape.  We have a stark small “d” democratic
challenge to overcome as we move into a new era of communications with one another—
to ensure that we all have accessibility to a dynamic, information-laden media. .Here I am 
talking about accessibility to a robust media for all Americans—you, me and 
310,000,000 others. This is about traditional media—radio, television, cable and 
newspapers. And it is about broadband, too. This is about broadband, too. It is about 
fostering a broad information infrastructure to guarantee the flow of news and 
information throughout the land.  Ensuring that every American has access to local news 
and information is the premise and prerequisite of democracy.  Our future depends upon 
an informed citizenry and the widest possible dissemination of news and information to 
fuel the nation’s conversation with itself.  While at first glance you may think this goes 
beyond your issues—it doesn’t.  It impacts them directly.  How the issues you personally 
deem most important are covered and treated by the media makes all the difference on 
how those issues will fare in the court of public opinion and in the councils of power.  If 
you’re happy about how our current media system is handling your issues, you need not 
listen to the rest of my remarks.  But if you think your top issues might benefit from a 
little more diverse coverage, a little more local flavor, and a little more competition 
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within the media industry, then you need to put media up their toward the top of your 
major issue concerns. 
This conversation about the future of the media must, of course, include Americans 
with disabilities, who need access to their local news to be fully participating members of 
our communities.  With respect to closed captioning, we’ve certainly seen some progress 
in the more than twenty years since the Television Decoder Circuitry Act that brought 
closed captioning to television sets and fifteen years since the 1996 Act extended closed 
captioning to nearly all television programming. But that was 15 years ago and there are 
still some serious gaps and it is high time that the Commission revisit our rules in this 
area. For example, generating captions based on the teleprompter text in a nightly 
newscast guarantees that deaf and hard of hearing individuals will miss breaking news, 
weather updates, and live field interviews. Viewing habits and programming schedules 
have changed since captioning rules were originally adopted more than a decade ago and 
the exemptions that were provided now encompass critical programming like early 
morning newscasts. These are some of the basic things the FCC can and should do to 
ensure that deaf and hard of hearing Americans have access to local news programming. 
But, like I said, America’s media shortfall affects every citizen in the land.  We 
just have to make sure that good, in-depth, hard-hitting news and information are 
available through our media.  There is no doubt that many Americans are increasingly 
accessing news and information via the Internet—whether it’s reading the newspaper 
digitally, watching a news station video online, accessing various blogs, or using a news 
aggregator to pick out the information they are looking for.  The Internet has huge 
potential here—if we’re smart about it and keep it open.  Indeed, there may be no greater 
benefit that broadband can deliver than its ability to help inform our civic dialogue and 
stimulate citizen engagement in our democracy.  But facing up to its challenges is also 
our public responsibility.  We don’t think about this nearly often enough.  
But we cannot put our heads in the digital sand and assume that in-depth news 
and accountability journalism will magically appear online while it has been disappearing 
in our traditional media.  We all know, I think, that thousands of journalists are walking 
the street in search of a job rather than walking the beat in search of a story, and that 
hundreds of newsrooms have been shuttered or put on starvation diets.  Investigative 
journalism is on the endangered species list.  I won’t go into the reasons why in great 
detail here, but the short version is an undisciplined era of rampant private sector 
speculation and consolidation that shrank news production.  And this consolidation 
process was aided and abetted by successive Federal Communications Commissions that 
encouraged it all, blessed it all, and walked willingly away from their public interest 
responsibilities.  The newspaper and the TV newsroom still produce probably more than 
90% of the news we get—even the news we read online—it’s just that there’s so much 
less of it—so much less in-depth reporting, so much less accountability journalism, so 
few reporters in state capitals and fewer bureaus around the world compared with what 
used to be. 
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Unless we fix the problems facing traditional news outlets, today’s problems in 
journalism will only continue, and inevitably get worse, in the broadband world of 
tomorrow. Right now I don’t see the model, the mass or the momentum in new media to 
fill the void that has eviscerated traditional media.  And we don’t have the time to wait 
for something that may never occur. We just have to find ways now to ensure that 
American citizens have access to a worthy media by reasserting public interest values for 
traditional broadcast media and taking other steps that I will be happy to talk about to 
make sure the digital world is able to realize its huge potential to nourish our democratic 
dialogue.  And we need to be especially vigilant that we don’t allow the dynamic, 
opportunity-creating potential of broadband and the Internet to travel down the same road
of consolidation and too much control by too few companies that inflicted so much 
damage on traditional media.  Will we be smart enough to do this?   I don’t know.  So far 
the signs are not particularly encouraging.  And so much is at stake.
One more thought in this regard.  We all remember that famous quote from 
Thomas Jefferson who, when talking about newspapers—the information infrastructure, 
the broadband, of his time—said that, if given the choice, he would prefer newspapers 
without government over a government without newspapers.  But that wasn’t all he said.  
Jefferson went on to say, “But I should mean that every man should receive those papers, 
and be capable of reading them.”  At this critical juncture two hundred years later we 
would be wise to heed that advice.  That is why we all need to be supporters of what are 
called the new literacies—digital literacy, media literacy and news literacy.  Your 
leadership understands how crucial it is that meaningful support be given to educate our 
citizens about how important this is to their futures and that they must learn how to 
navigate the awesome power of the Internet.  It’s crucial that, with the proliferation of 
websites, our young people—and us elders, too—can distinguish between trustworthy 
and not-so-trusty places on the Net and  that we provide our young citizens the education 
they need to use—and avoid being misused by—our media ecosystem.  These are the 
kinds of things we need to be doing now, not only to instill the importance of quality 
journalism and to find ways to support its creation, but to strengthen our democracy 
through a citizenry armed with the news and information it needs to make informed 
decisions about the future of our country. 
So, put all the things together that I’ve talked about this morning and I think we’ll 
agree—there’s a lot to do.  A whole lot to do before every American shares in the 
benefits of advanced telecommunications and world-class media that can open the doors 
to a better future. I am proud to have travelled this far down the road with you, but we all 
realize there are so many more steps we need to take together for all people with 
disabilities—and indeed for all Americans—who want to be, need to be and indeed 
deserve to be, fully participating, mainstream citizens in our society.  If we pull 
together—if you continue and even expand your cooperation with other affected 
communities and build effective alliances with them, with business and with 
government—if you stay vigilant as new technologies develop—and if you keep pushing, 
really pushing, at the public policy level, we can meet and master all these challenges. 
As many of you know, I am completing my time at the Commission this year.  But 
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I also want you to know this:  I am going to continue speaking out and working on these 
issues in the years ahead.  Your voices inspired me as I walked through the doors of the 
Commission ten years ago and they continue to inspire me today.  Your work, my 
work—our work—is not done.  But we’re on the march, we’re making progress, and we 
shall overcome.  
Thank you for the good and wonderful things you do, thank you for today, and 
thank you for the friendship you have shown me through the years.  God bless you all.