National Broadband Plan: A Quartet for an Anniversary

[Source: The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, by Blair Levin, March 18, 2011]

The one-year anniversary of the National Broadband Plan was marked by a number of conferences. I spoke at several. In each, I tried to address a different question.

In the first, hosted by the Joint Center for Economic and Political Studies, I looked at how we should approach increasing adoption. While I am very proud of the plan, on this issue, I have rethought what we did and think the approach we proposed will not work, and that there is a better way. Our approach, based on the voice-related issues of availability and cost are not the right foundation for broadband related issues in which, in addition to availability and cost, we must address use and training. I set out a four-step program that I hope will help reframe the debate, as we need a workable program to solve this problem. The speech can be found here. I might note many friends think it was a mistake to admit a mistake. In D.C., it certainly is unusual. Nonetheless, this issue is far too important to worry about such things, and I am hopeful the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) process now going on will help put us in the right direction.

In the second, an investor conference, I looked at some competition issues raised by Professor Susan Crawford in her article on “The Looming Cable Monopoly.” Her piece was based entirely on data from the plan. She didn’t misuse the data but, as I discuss in my talk, I think she errs in projecting how she thinks the market will unfold. Projecting data forward is always a tricky business. If it weren’t, stock picking would be both easy and not very lucrative. I think cable is in a very strong position, as it was for broadband a decade ago, but I am skeptical it is on the verge of a monopoly. Professor Crawford turns what I think of as a possibility not only into a probability but, further, into a certainty. My commentary on her piece, which I analyzed as I would have any piece of equity research, can be found here.

While at that conference, I also noted what several broadcasters have noted to me. Broadcasting will have to make another evolution—from the current MPEG 2 to the future MPEG 4 standard—if it is to remain a viable business. As MPEG 4 is more efficient in terms of spectrum use, I suggested broadcasters come forward with a plan that can be merged with the government’s path to obtain more spectrum. Needless to say, it stirred some controversy and no doubt, we will be discussing spectrum policy for many Plan anniversaries.

In the third conference, held by the Federal Communications Bar Association, I tried to explain what I thought was the core vision of the plan. While many think the core vision should be about faster wireline networks to homes, the speech explains how we were aiming toward high performance knowledge exchange. In sum, the idea is this: The core task for our economy and civic society is knowledge exchange. We gather information, analyze it, act on it, and then through a feedback loop, continually revise courses of action. Three revolutions in the last two decades have dramatically transformed knowledge exchange: the data revolution, the computing revolution, and the communications revolution. This knowledge exchange revolution affects every sector of the economy and every institution that constitutes our civic society.

Knowledge exchange takes many different forms but shares a common platform: the broadband ecosystem; the interaction of networks, devices, applications, and, above all, people who know how to use it. Broadband has created a commons of collaboration. As broadband is the common collaborative platform for both the economy and our civic society, we need a broadband ecosystem that facilitates knowledge exchange in ways that constantly improve so that we constantly improve how we exchange knowledge. Thus, the core idea of the National Broadband Plan: high performance knowledge exchange. In one sentence, the plan was about improving economic performance and our civic society by assuring that America has a broadband ecosystem that enables high performance knowledge exchange. The full speech can be found here.

What may have been my favorite conference was one where I didn’t speak (coincidence?). The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation did a conference in which the leaders of the National Purposes groups (Health Care, Education, Energy, Public Safety and Government Performance) spoke about what had transpired in the last year. It’s an extraordinary group of past, current and future public servants and the progress on a number of fronts is quite inspiring. The video of it will soon be on the ITIF website: www.itif.org. Actually, I did say something involving a 1976 Saturday Night Live sketch in which Lorne Michaels offered $3,000 to the Beatles if they would do a reunion gig on the show and learned that in 2011, references to a 1976 TV show are not likely to strike a chord.

And finally I spoke at a conference put on by Columbia and Georgetown Universities. My purpose in this one was to put the plan in the context of policy development make that case that, as we often said during the process, “plan beats no plan.” The speech describes how, properly understood, the plan was an agenda setting, target-clarifying device. That is, the plan was a process whose endpoint was to lay out—particularly for the stakeholders—an agenda for action. Further, the plan details policy targets to aim for–in the sense of policies to adopt–or aim at, in the sense of policies to shoot at and propose better alternatives. The speech also tries to provide a framework for how to judge the progress of the plan’s implementation. The speech can be found here.

Fortunately, the anniversary was not all serious policy and debate. The team held a wonderful reunion Tuesday night and one reporter decided to ask me a set of questions that were on the lighter side. That piece can be found here. It is likely the only time you will be able to Google “national broadband plan,” “Colin Firth,” “Michelle Yeoh,” and “Russell Crowe” and find a link. So, we got that going for us.

Blair Levin is the Communications and Society Fellow at the Aspen Institute and author of Universal Broadband: Targeting Investments to Deliver Broadband Services to All Americans. He served as executive director of the Federal Communications Commission’s Omnibus Broadband Initiative which created the National Broadband Plan.