"The onslaught of communications technology," WFB begins, "has caught us

unprepared. We know now how to give the individual consumer the widest choice of programming; we can reach an individual television set via satellite in Santa Barbara, California, and see what the resident of Atlanta, Georgia, is seeing, assuming that this is something you want to see." Mr. Ferris's dual background makes him well qualified to discuss the legal and social implications of all of this, which he does with verve: "We're making decisions today at the FCC that I think are determining to a great extent the basic infrastructure of the information of the society of the 21st century, and it bothers me that more people are not paying attention to what we are doing.... We are determining to a great extent what it is we are going to carry from the 20th century into the 21st about the Bill of Rights, about the sense of privacy, about what are the things about our society that we really cherish, that could be infringed by the [new cable and satellite] technology unless some thought is given to it."