Blogband Comments to Be Made Part of FCC Record on Broadband Plan

“People are blogging in a very substantive way and they're getting very substantive comments back,” Genachowski said. “We are going to include those comments in the public record of the proceeding. The new media team and the broadband team are working with our General Counsel’s Office to tackle the Administrative Procedure Act issues. Our goal is to have that be as legitimate a forum for advising the commission as written filings.”

Genachowski said he’s not trying to put the communications bar out of business but said people should have an alternative, less formal way to make points to the FCC beyond traditional filings. “It’s a perfectly good thing that anyone can hire a lawyer and submit filings at the FCC,” he said. “It just shouldn’t be the only way for people who have something to say at the FCC to get their points of view on the record.” The chairman, meanwhile, Thursday posted his first video blog on the Blogband site.

Genachowski said the 23 broadband workshops that have taken place so far have been a success. “I think it has been the most open and participatory fact-gathering process the commission has ever engaged in,” he said. “I'm very proud of the team for having organized that and executed that.”

Genachowski also said the FCC recognizes that it needs to make information available in paper form, in multiple languages, and can’t rely on the Internet alone to communicate with the public. “We have to do it,” he said. “In low-income communities up to 60 percent of the people don’t subscribe to broadband It’s challenging because it requires more resources, in some cases duplicative resources. It’s not healthy, but we're in a transition time.”

Eduardo Pena, who represents the League of United Latin America Citizens on the committee, warned Genachowski that many can’t afford to pay for broadband. “What are we going to do about that?” Pena said. “It’s our broadband, but we can’t have it because we don’t have the money.”

“Affordability is a real issue that the commission is looking at as part of the national broadband strategy,” Genachowski replied. “There have been at least one or two workshops looking already at affordability and adoption issues. You're raising a very important issues. Broadband is available in … roughly 90 percent of the country. But adoption in the areas where broadband is available is closer to 50 percent, lower than that in low income areas. That’s a problem. It is one of the problems that Congress identified, that the president identified, and said ‘FCC, figure this out.’ Now it’s hard to figure it out. Someone has got to pay to roll out the pipes or to set up the spectrum that actually gets broadband delivered to people.”

Genachowski closed with a criticism of the previous administration and its lack of focus on broadband. “No one thinks we're going to deliver universal broadband in the next year, but we should have had a plan as a country years ago. We didn’t,” he said. “We will have a plan now that will solve the types of problems you're talking about What we're committed to doing is looking at the facts, looking at the data, being very smart about what it actually costs to build out broadband in rural areas.”

In other comments Thursday, Commissioner Mignon Clyburn told the committee she spent the last two days meeting with consumer, public interest and civil rights groups on consumer issues before the FCC. Clyburn told the committee it has an important role in development of the broadband plan. “I will read your recommendations, consider them carefully and give you feedback,” she said. “I believe that this agency must be a consumer agency first and foremost. I am not here merely to keep a seat warm, but rather to give an active voice to those people who need and rarely get one.”

“We have a lot of work to do,” said Commissioner Robert McDowell. “We're working on a number of things, but the biggest project we're working on right now in the National Broadband Plan and that encompasses so much of what we're doing.”

Thomas Wyatt, deputy chief of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, said consumer outreach on broadband will be similar to the FCC’s efforts on the DTV transition, though there are substantial differences. “As with the DTV transition, consumer education and outreach will be critical to the success of the national broadband plan,” Wyatt said. “But even in areas where broadband access is readily available and affordable a significant percentage of consumers do not use it because they do not see the value relative to their lives. That certainly was not the case for DTV except in a few instances across the country.” On broadband, the FCC also must overcome the widespread perception “especially among seniors, that broadband is too technically complex or cumbersome to use,” Wyatt said.

Working groups within the committee also met Thursday to start developing a set of principles and other guidance to be submitted to the FCC on the broadband plan. The committee agreed to meet again this year, most likely Dec. 4, to further discuss the plan.

Consumer Advisory Committee Notes

Genachowski said the FCC will likely update its web page to make information available in different Asian languages, similar to how information is now available in Spanish. Ken McEldowney, who represents Consumer Action on the committee, suggested the FCC provide information in Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese. ----

Each of the FCC commissioners will chair a field hearing on a different broadband topic, starting Sept. 21 with a hearing led by Commissioner Meredith Baker in Austin on spectrum issues, said Roger Goldblatt, FCC broadband plan outreach and policy advisor. The FCC will also likely hold other consumer forums across the U.S., he said. “We're still trying to figure out the process for how we do these field hearings or how we do these forums,” he said. “We're totally open [to ideas]. There’s nothing that for sure we won’t do. As you've heard from the chairman this morning, they really want to do it right, which is kind of nice.” ----

The FCC will launch within the next two weeks a revised electronic comment filing system for internal review at the commission, said Mary Beth Richards, special counsel on FCC reform. The system will then be released for public use after commission testing. “It is going to have improved search capabilities, it will have an RSS feed so you can match criteria that you're interested in, it will allow a single comment to be filed in multiple proceedings,” Richards said. Howard Buskirk