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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Patrick Ross
January 31, 2005
(202) 289-8928
   
PFF Launching Major Policy Initiative
Communications in the Digital Age to be Addressed

WASHINGTON D.C. - Recognizing that market forces and technological advances are rapidly remaking the communications landscape, The Progress & Freedom Foundation is joining forces with policy and legal experts from across the policy landscape in a major new research effort. Details of this new project will be unveiled Tuesday at a media event at the National Press Club. Topics to be addressed include the regulatory framework for telecommunications, universal service, federal/state relations, spectrum, and institutional reform.

"There is but one ideological premise to this undertaking," said PFF President Ray Gifford, "that the nation's communications' laws, policies and institutions are in need of reform. The participants in this effort hail from across the political spectrum, and they have agreed to come together to try and form consensus positions about proper reform. We start with no presuppositions except that reform is necessary, and have no predetermined outcomes."

Gifford and Senior Fellow Randolph May, director of Communications Policy Studies, will host the event. Gifford and May will be joined by Wiley Rein & Fielding partner Nancy Victory, who served as Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information and Administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration from 2001-2003 under President George W. Bush; Mayer Brown Rowe & Maw partner David McIntosh, who represented the 2nd District of Indiana in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995-2001 and chaired the Subcommittee on Regulatory Relief, after having been executive director of the President's Council on Competitiveness and Assistant to the Vice President in the first Bush administration; Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr partner C. Boyden Gray, who was counsel to President George H.W. Bush and served as counsel to the Presidential Task Force on Regulatory Relief, chaired by Vice President Bush; and James Miller III, chairman of CapAnalysis, from 1985-1988 director of the Office of Management and Budget and chairman of the Federal Trade Commission from 1981-1985.

"We believe that the transformation of the communications sector - from analog to digital, from circuits to packets, from monopolistic platforms to multiple platforms - warrants consideration as a whole," May said. "We are striving to draw out the counsel and recommendations of a serious, respected group of scholars."

The event will be February 1st at 10 a.m. in the First Amendment Lounge of the National Press Club. Reporters and interested parties are welcome to attend, participants will answer questions, and materials related to the effort will be available. Reservations are not necessary. After the event, materials will be on The Progress & Freedom Foundation web site.

The Progress & Freedom Foundation is a market-oriented think tank that studies the digital revolution and its implications for public policy. It is a 501(c)(3) research & educational organization.

 

 

The Progress & Freedom Foundation