Comm Daily Notebook
People seem to “get” that the National Broadband Plan is a “call to action,” said FCC broadband plan Executive Director Blair Levin at a Brookings Institution event Wednesday. The team set out to write a document that was both “visionary…
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and practical,” and “the kind of advice companies would get if they had millions of dollars on the line,” he said. Levin believes the FCC achieved that. Everyone who’s reacted to the plan likes “large pieces” of it, which is good because Levin hoped people would love 80 percent, be indifferent to 10 percent and hate 10 percent, he said. Relatively little has been said about the national purposes section of the report, he said, but Levin expects that part will have the most material impact 10 years from now. Quick action is most likely to occur on recommendations the team made to the FCC, said Levin. “On the key issues affecting the FCC -- USF and intercarrier [compensation] -- there was a fair amount of acceptance of the need to go forward and that there is a framework now to go forward.” And President Barack Obama has explicitly supported the FCC’s proposals on spectrum and public safety, he said. “Congressional action [is] always more difficult to predict,” but the team “designed the plan so that the core recommendations could be done without Congress for the most part,” Levin said. Broadband Plan General Manager Erik Garr hopes the level of discussion on facts and outcomes at the commission continues. He described the broadband plan proceeding as “the most open and transparent planning process we could physically do.” The team “wanted to walk the walk” and be an example of an effective open government, said Phoebe Yang, general counsel for the team. The team worked nonstop until the end, said Levin. “For the last 75 days, the four of us have pretty much worked every single day.”