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The 14th Congressional District is home to much of
Silicon Valley and many of the world's foremost technology and
telecommunications innovators, who have led the world in developing the
innovations and discoveries that continue to shape our society and lead
our economy. As the representative of Silicon Valley, Congresswoman
Eshoo led the fight to create uniform standards limiting frivolous
lawsuits, saving investors and the high-tech industry billions of
dollars. Representative Eshoo's bill authorizing electronic signatures
brought commerce into the digital age and was the model for digital
signatures by the European Union. As a founding member of the
Congressional Internet Caucus, she created a program to provide
discounts to schools and libraries for Internet access.
Representative Eshoo is a leader in Congress on issues affecting
high-technology, the Internet, and health science, and is committed to
ensuring that the U.S. continues to lead the world in these critical
fields in the 21st Century.
In this section:
The Innovation Agenda: A Commitment to Keep America #1
Broadband Deployment
Broadband video and Net Neutrality
E-911
Employee Stock Options
Privacy
Patent Reform
The Innovation Agenda: A Commitment to Keep America #1
In November 2005, Rep. Eshoo joined with the House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and other colleagues to launch the Innovation Agenda: A Commitment to Competitiveness to Keep America #1.
This agenda was developed after extensive consultation with America's
leaders in high-technology, biotechnology, venture capital, and
academia beginning in the 14th Congressional District at
Stanford University. Subsequent meetings were held around the country
with private-sector leaders to seek their views and to develop a plan
for our nation to remain competitive and keep us number one.
The House Democrats made a commitment to the following with the Innovation Agenda:
- Greatly increase our investments in research and development
(R&D), including doubling National Science Foundation (NSF) funding
and modernizing and making permanent the R&D tax credit;
- Improve education in science and math and make college accessible to any student who is qualified to attend;
- Provide universal broadband access for all Americans in five years;
- Achieve energy independence in ten years;
- Promote
opportunities for small business and innovative startups, ensuring
access to venture capital, improving the patent system, and reducing
healthcare costs.
These are among the most important issues we face as a country and we
will need to work together - as Democrats and Republicans - to preserve
America's leadership in innovation and technology.
Read and learn more about the Innovation Agenda.
Broadband Deployment
With the impending acquisition of BellSouth by AT&T, it's clear that the telecom wars surrounding the 1996 Telecommunications Act
are concluding with the reformation of Ma Bell. Decisions by the
federal courts and the FCC to deny reasonable local loop access to
competitive telephone providers doomed any prospect of local wireline
telephone competition. The mergers that followe these decisions are the
final shovels of dirt on the efforts of Congress to engender local
telephone competition in the '96 Act.
With the completion of the AT&T-BellSouth merger, AT&T and
Verizon will together serve more than 60% of the households in America.
While the Bells are likely to become increasingly competitive with
cable companies in offering broadband, voice and video services, the
cable industry is also highly concentrated within regional markets, and
the vast majority of consumers are now able to choose only a single
cable provider.
What's happened to our nation's progress in promoting advanced
communications while the Bells have been busy eliminating local and
long distance phone competition and consolidating the telecom industry?
The situation could hardly be bleaker: The United States has fallen
from 4th to 16th in broadband penetration worldwide since 2001.
As the country that led the world in innovation for the past century,
invented the telephone and developed the Internet, this is a sad state
of affairs. Some of our competitors - such as China, South Korea, and
India - have avoided many of the problems associated with advanced
telecommunications deployment because their existing infrastructures
were extremely limited. They haven't had to manage a difficult
transition from vast telephone networks to broadband. Instead, they've
gone straight to a high-speed, fiber-optic infrastructure.
On the other hand, a number of countries currently outpacing the U.S.
in broadband deployment (such as Japan and several European countries)
have chosen to adopt essentially the opposite broadband policies to
those currently being implemented here, including broadband universal
service policies and market-opening regulations. Rep. Eshoo has
repeatedly expressed concerns that Presidential leadership on broadband
has been non-existent, and the Federal Communications Commission -
under the leadership of Chairman Powell and Chairman Martin - has
focused almost exclusively on promoting "market-based" solutions that
ignore the market power of entrenched incumbents.
Our country can no longer sit idly by while the rest of the world runs
circles around us in the rollout of advanced communications services
and universal broadband. Telecommunications is the "central nervous
system" of the entire economy and high speed, always-on broadband
Internet communications will enable a vast array of advanced Internet
applications and services including Voice over Internet Protocol
(VoIP), video on-demand, electronic health, and distance education. The
United States' ability to deploy this advanced communications
infrastructure is crucial to our future productivity and will in large
part determine our ability to succeed in the global information
economy.
It's essential for the President and Congress to come together to
formulate a comprehensive strategy to address this urgent priority and
put our country back on the path to leadership in this critical sector.
Read Rep. Eshoo's speech on broadband deployment to the Economic Strategy Institute.
Read Rep. Eshoo's op-ed on broadband in Roll Call.
Broadband video and Net Neutrality
The agenda of the Telecom Subcommittee in 2006 will be dominated by
efforts to enact legislation to create a new regulatory framework for
IP-based video services, providing regulatory relief for the regional
Bells as they enter the IP video business in competition with cable and
satellite.
During the Committee's debate on these issues, Rep. Eshoo has led
efforts to enact meaningful protections for network neutrality or "Net
Neutrality." Net Neutrality refers to the debate over actions by
broadband service providers to provide discriminatory access to
Internet content and services by providing faster, higher quality
broadband service for content they offer themselves or through their
affiliates and partners.
This issue is of tremendous concern to Internet companies such as
Google, Yahoo!, eBay, Apple, and Amazon as they seek to roll out new
services, as well as a wide array of colleges and universities,
consumer groups, and organizations dedicated to freedom of expression.
Without strong Net Neutrality protections, the open architecture of the
Internet that has allowed innovation on the Net to thrive will be
replaced by "walled gardens" controlled by the large Bell and cable
companies.
Rep. Eshoo believes that strong Net Neutrality rules must be written
into any broadband reform legislation, and will continue to fight to
preserve the free and open Internet. She has cosponsored H.R. 5273, the Network Neutrality Act of 2006, which will ensure that network operators do not discriminate among content providers and frustrate consumers' expectations.
Read Rep. Eshoo's op-ed on Net Neutrality in the San Jose Mercury News.
Learn more about Net Neutrality at http://www.savetheinternet.com/ .
E-911
Rep. Eshoo was the lead Democratic sponsor of the ENHANCE 911 Act,
legislation to upgrade our nation's emergency 911 system to allow
emergency operators to locate callers on mobile telephones. The ENHANCE
911 Act was signed into law in December of 2004, and is designed to
speed Enhanced 911 implementation and improve coordination among all
levels of government by providing significant seed money to address and
promote best practices and technology innovations. The funding will
ensure that Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) are ready to deploy
vital call answering equipment for all technologies. The law authorizes
$250 million in matching grants for states, local governments and
tribal organizations to improve their 911 communications systems, hire
and train more personnel, and purchase equipment.
Employee Stock Options
Representative Eshoo has long been concerned about the impact of
changes in accounting rules on broad-based stock options plans and the
employees that benefit from this important employee ownership tool. For
more than a decade, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB)
threatened to require stock options to be deducted from a company's
earnings, and in recent years it has seized on unrelated corporate
accounting scandals to push forward on this agenda.
In the 108th Congress, Rep. Eshoo was the lead
Democratic sponsor of H.R. 3574, the Stock Option Accounting Reform
Act, which attracted over 130 bipartisan cosponsors, and passed the
House by an overwhelming margin of 312-111. Unfortunately, without the
support of the Administration, the bill died in the Senate and in
December of 2004 FASB finalized its mandatory stock options expensing
standard. The rule was subsequently adopted by the Securities and
Exchange Commission (SEC) and mandatory stock options expensing is now
required of all public companies. Representative Eshoo reintroduced
legislation in the 109th Congress, H.R. 913, the Broad-Based Stock Option Plan Transparency Act, to prevent the FASB rule from taking effect, but the legislation has not been considered by the House.
FASB's mandatory expensing rule has had a significant impact on
companies that rely on options to recruit and retain the most talented
employees. Many have been forced to drop or severely limit employee
option plans because of the prospect of taking a huge and misleading
charge against their bottom line in accounting statements. Industry
groups and companies are continuing to work with the SEC to press them
to develop a realistic expensing model, but it's unclear whether these
discussions will bear fruit. Representative Eshoo remains concerned
about the impact of the mandatory expensing rule and will continue to
look for ways to mitigate the impact of this regulation on companies
and rank-and-file employees.
Privacy
The issue of personal privacy is one that the American people feel to
the core of their being. When any of us provide an institution with
personal information, we want to be sure that the information is used
in the narrowest sense, and that the information will be protected from
misuse or theft. At a minimum, companies should be required to disclose
if they buy or sell consumer information or if they track the
whereabouts of Internet surfers even after they've left a company's
website. Consumers should be given the opportunity to opt-out of this
use of their information.
There is a growing need for protection of individual privacy, and as a
Member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Rep. Eshoo will
be actively involved in congressional efforts to implement sound,
strong privacy laws to protect consumers and prevent fraud and identity
theft. Through the combined efforts of government and industry, Rep.
Eshoo hopes to develop privacy legislation that will give consumers
control over their own privacy and require the private sector to be a
responsible steward of their personal information.
Patent Reform
Our
patent system currently suffers from a large backlog in processing
patents and many have expressed concerns that the Patent and Trademark
Office (PTO) needs additional expertise and resources to keep pace with
the rapid innovation of the 21st Century. While additional investments
in the PTO were made in the last Congress, additional reforms are
needed to ensure that the PTO and the U.S. patent system are sound over
the long term.
In order to ensure that our patent system is able to respond to the
rapid pace of innovation, it's important for Congress to establish a
better balance between the needs of innovators to produce new products
without the burden of unnecessary patent litigation and the interests
of inventors in their legitimate intellectual property. These reforms
will enable greater research and development of new technologies,
stimulating the economy and creating new, high-paying jobs.
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