Wired for Progress

Barton Primed for Effort to Overhaul Telecom Act

• June 2, 2005, 2:51 p.m.

When Texas Rep. Joe Barton (R) assumed the chairmanship of the Energy and Commerce Committee from retiring Rep. Billy Tauzin (R-La.) in the last Congress, he also inherited something else. Namely, stewardship of a tangle of national telecommunication laws applying a mish-mash of regulations to a cluster of industries growing so rapidly that the government has been hard-pressed to keep up oversight.

Already, Barton’s panel has dug into the issues with a bill addressing the onset of universal digital television technology and is moving forward with legislation that will have a profound impact on the way the federal government regulates the Internet.

But the biggest mountain for Barton and other Members and Senators to climb in this arena will be a massive rewrite of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, something he estimates has a “75 percent chance” of coming to pass in the current Congress. Barton sat for a Q&A with Roll Call Executive Editor Morton M. Kondracke.