The digital era requires policymakers to change fundamental assumptions, Blair Levin, who headed the...
The digital era requires policymakers to change fundamental assumptions, Blair Levin, who headed the team that wrote the FCC’s National Broadband Plan, said in a speech last week. Levin, who spoke at the Minority Media and Telecom Council conference, said…
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the way the Universal Service Fund is structured makes little sense now. “We'll spend $20,000 a line a year to subsidize a line to a second home but almost nothing to connect unserved homes and to help people who are digitally illiterate,” he said. “Actually, it’s worse. We assess those unserved and the digitally illiterate homes every month to pay for subsidies for areas and people far better off. … What is the economic or moral principle that justifies that?” Spectrum is allocated based on the market of 60 years ago, Levin added. “We provide educational content over the platform developed by Gutenberg-textbooks-instead of that developed by Bezos and Jobs, even though e-books are better for education and cheaper,” he said. “We provide emergency alerts on a one-way, nondynamic, location-ignorant platform that Americans are only occasionally connected to instead of the two-way, dynamic, location aware platform most Americans are next to 24/7, one that would be far more effective in an emergency.”