Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein begins by playing harmonica with Howard Levy. Really. [As always, the following paraphrases, abbrevites, omits, and gets wrong.]

[I'm sitting next to Susan Crawford who is blogging away. Hers will be the post to read on this.]

Then he touts the E-Rate program. But "we lack a coordinated vision for success...We need to provide for all of our neighbors. This has to be a greater national priority than it is now." A national strategy should have benchmarks. Update the current FCC definition of "high speed" as 200kb [which is laughable — dialup is 56k]. Have standards for expressing what rates customers are getting. We need meaningful competition. "We can't let the broadband market settle into a comfortable duopoly..." We should worry about consolidation. The Congress should use tax incentives to bring access to under-served areas, and more [can't keep up]. We should invest in basic R&D. Be creative and flexible. We need to preserve the creative freedom of the Net. "You're all reinventing democracy, how we share music..." We need to preserve the Net's openness. The AT&T merger brought about an agreement about Net Neutrality that isn't the end of the story but at least refutes the notion that NN can't be defined.

Q:(frankston) The FCC and the Net are incompatible. The Net is what we can get by connecting our home networks from the edge. The FCC defines it in terms of services instead of in terms of bits.
A: We took a step with the AT&T merger....
Q: No, you treat it as a service. We don't need the phone companies to run the Internet.
A: We need an infrastructure. There's a balance here. We need to be realistic.

Q: (isenberg) The chat was wondering how much power you have.
A: I'm one of five commissioners.

Q: (brough) What about cognitive radio opening up spectrum?
A: I was going to talk about that but cut it for time. Maybe I made the wrong choice. Software-defined radio is one of the most exciting developments I've seen and maybe the most revolutionary in spectrum use. We need to find ways to enable them to reach their full fruition. Our engineers are examining the ways they can work. It's a way of doing more with less because, as someone said, G-d isn't making any more spectrum. Of course, we have to be concerned about harmful interference, but in general I'm very high on it.

Q: (JH Snider) Please elaborate on what you said about the carrot-stick approach. The FCC has been 99.99% carrot. In the past few years, the FCC has given away $50B in spectrum allocation. Look at what you did with the MMDS band. You gave it away to Sprint and they haven't built anything. Eight years later they may actually build it out. Where's the stick?
A: It's so much easier to give away carrots. Politicians like to do that. It's happened time and again in spectrum policy.