Kevin Wehrback is interviewing Larry Strickland, Administrator of the NTIA.

NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people.

Larry says that he’s the President’s chief advisor on information policy. “The bulk of our resources go to the assignment of federal spectrum.” They handle the relationship with ICANN and issues of Internet governance. They have a “policy shop” that they are going to “rebrand” as the Internet policy shop, rather than an telecom policy shop. Danny Weizner of MIT is heading that up. And there’s a lab in Boulder that does spectrum research. They have a grant-making organization that has $5B in Recovery funds for project that expand broadband adoption.

Kevin: Your worked in the Obama campaign. What’s the approach of this Admin to tech and comms and what came before?

LS: The previous admin hadn’t focused on this. Obama has been focused on tech issues from when he was a Senator. Take a look at the campaign platform on tech: broadband, competitiveness, education, science…SmartGrid, Health IT, high speed rail….The President wants to leave his mark in each of these areas.

KW: So, you’re a VC with a $5B fund. What’s the role of the grant program?

LS: The Recovery Act laid out three areas, including making a national broadband map available by 2011. In a perfect world, there might have been a sequencing of the acts[i.e., do the map before you do the broadband strategy, or so I take him]. Our $5B is supposed to be spent in part on improving adoption and upgrading public Internet centers. We’ll announce the first round of grants ($1.6B at least) in the next few weeks. We received 1700-1800 apps, asking for 10x the dollars we have. So, we know we’ll turn down a lot of good projects. For the infrastructure projects, we’re focused on how to get the most bang for our dollar. We’re looking at this as a jobs reation project just as much as an infrastructure creation project. We want to build foundational infrastructure in as many communities as we can. Then there are middle mile projects (which might be shorter than a mile or hundreds of miles.) But we’re really interested in comprehensive communities where as part of the project you look to connect the key anchor facilities (schools, libraries,s gov’t buildings, etc.). If you bring in the high speed connection and connect the anchor institutions, people get used to using the Internet as a part of their jobs or school. This will grow demand for having the service in the household.

KW: How should we define success?

LS: For our $5B: Five years from now are these projects still in operation? The projects need to be sustainable. The other part of success for us: The FCC says this is a $20B-$350B problem. There’s no expectation we’re going to get more money, especially after last night’s Afghanistan announcement. So, it’s imperative that we’re spending money on projects that provide guidance to private industry that can undertake the rest. This has led to interesting conversations. We look for ways to take the outcomes of gov-t-assisted projects and generalize them so private industry can step forward and build them without subsidy.

KW: ICANN?

LS: We kept hearing that ICANN has tons of process and public participation, but we can’t see how that’s improved their decision-making. We still expect to see changes in ICANN’s performance now; we’re not waiting for a review committee next summer.

KW: Will we get a dramatic increase in usable spectrum in this administration?

LS: People means different things. AT&T et al. think it means auctioning off large blocks. I can’t tell you now that there are big blocks to auction off. It becomes harder to find bands where you can relocate people and those bands available for auction. The FCC is identifying commercial bands, setting off discussions or what some might call a firefight. This is a discussion that will be an important one. The national broadband plan [see www.BroadbandStrategyWeek.com :) ] will stimulate more discussion. And it will become important to find new ways of sharing bands. That won’t meet the needs of AT&T et al., but it will help meet the insatiable demand for more spectrum. As we look at comprehensive communities and bringing fiber — which is the deployment of choice — could at least bend the curve on the need for spectrum.

[Public questions]

Q: How does making NTIA the Net policy center fit with the FCC’s aspirations?
A: The FCC is fine with it. They’re a regulatory agency. The NTIA speaks for the Obama admin.

Q: How’s the coordination between NTIA, FCC, broadband strategy group, etc., going?
A: We spend an enormous amount of time on inter-agency coordination. We’re in close conversation with the national broadband strategy folks. We have the statutory responsibility for the national broadband map, we’ll work with the FCC. And we’d like it to reflect data that both of us collect. [Again, see the BroadBandStrategyWeek.com interview on what it's doing about mapping.]

Q: Will people rejected in round one know in time to apply for round 2?
A: Yes.

Q: How about funding testbed projects from which we can learn best practices?
A: (KW interjects that the NTIA has crowdsourced the grant review process.) Yes, that’s part of our charge. Not sure where it fits in our prioritization. But I’ll pick benefiting a state over trying out a theory we may not know will work.

Q: I’m concerned when DC folks think of spectrum only as a free for all way of raising money. What about cognitive radio and open spectrum?
A: That clearly has to be a priority. If you’re going to find ways for people to get more use out of existing spectrum, cognitive radio has to be a part of that.

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