Broadband Policy Overhaul Proposed at New America Conference
FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein and a group of academics, most with ties to the Obama administration, laid out a proposed revamp of wireline and wireless broadband policy Monday at a New America Foundation conference. All argued that fundamental change is needed from the policies of the Bush administration.
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“We have to upgrade our communications infrastructure in every corner of this country,” said Adelstein, in the keynote. “We've got do a better job of making innovative communications more widely available and more affordable. It’s clear we have an economic interest to do so… It’s also of interest to our healthcare system, our environment, our educational system and almost every big challenge that we face. All of the big challenges that were debated throughout this campaign can be addressed to some extent through improvements in our telecommunications infrastructure.”
Adelstein called wireless broadband “the wave of the future” and said the new administration must put more emphasis on spectrum efficiency and spectrum management. “God isn’t making any new spectrum so we've got to do more with what we've got,” he said.
Marvin Ammori, an assistant law professor at the University of Nebraska, said that as the U.S. invests as much as $6 billion in broadband infrastructure through the economic stimulus bill, the country will only be playing catch-up with the rest of the world. Ammori said the only telecom policy of the Bush administration was deregulation, which “worked so well in the financial sector.”
The Obama administration must make a clean break with the past, Ammori said. “We know that the United States has fallen behind many of our global competitors when it comes to competition, value and speeds and deployment of broadband,” he said. “In Japan almost all citizens can buy connections that are 20 times the speed of U.S. connections and often 100 times faster on the upload at a fraction of the cost.”
Ammori said the U.S. faces three key challenges: increasing buildout in rural America, making networks in urban areas here more comparable to those in foreign cities such as Tokyo, and driving down the prices American often pay for slow connections. “Broadband does matter,” he said. “It’s central to our economy. Broadband can support new jobs.” Barack Obama wouldn’t have been elected president without harnessing the Internet effectively, he said. “All of the candidates for chairman of the Republican National Committee are running a campaign promising to upgrade the technology of the RNC.”
Rural areas have gotten “only a trickle” of the national investment in broadband and should be a priority of the Obama administration, said Prof. Sharon Strover of the University of Texas’ broadcasting and film department. “E-rate and the high cost programs of universal service have helped, as have some RUS programs,” she said. “But they have been too small. They have been administered without binding … rules, without good assessments, and really without precision in terms of targeting and understanding where the money is being spent.”
About 54 million people live in rural areas in the U.S., and only 39 percent of rural homes have access to broadband, a much lower proportion than urban ones, Strover said. There’s little competition in the countryside and prices are higher, she said. “If there is a provider there, there’s generally only one provider quite typically,” she said.
Jon Peha of Carnegie Mellon University, the FCC’s chief technologist, proposed increased openness in government spectrum use. The best opportunity for advancing spectrum sharing soon is increasing sharing the TV band, he said. Changing the spectrum auction process is critical, too, he said, proposing a yearly payment system for spectrum licenses instead of making a large one time payment. This would make spectrum available for more users and bring the U.S. Treasury steady revenue, he said.
Rob Friedenad of Pennsylvania State University promoted wireless open access. If devices and networks are controlled by carriers and manufacturers, their value will be reduced, he said. There’s a great need for openness in market assessment, he said, saying the Carterfone doctrine should be extended to wireless. The killer applications for wireless service in the U.S. are voice, texting and ring tones, in the absence of the variety of location-based and e-commerce wireless applications adopted in Europe and Asia, he said. Locked handsets and wireless networks restrict the availability of content applications, he said. More attention to consolidation is needed, too, he said, questioning the public interest in the Verizon-Alltel marriage. More enforcement of consumer protection laws against practices like early termination fees are important, too, he said.
American University’s Kathryn Montgomery urged the Federal Trade Commission to more effectively monitor and enforce the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, develop policy safeguards to protect the privacy of adolescents online and take up marketing’s role in obesity among young people. Meanwhile, in carrying out congressional requirements on food and beverage marketing to children, the FTC should develop clear, consistent guidelines to ensure that all food and beverage companies use fair marketing practices across all media with minors, she said. The panelists recently authored a book titled … and Communications for All: A Policy Agenda for the New Administration.