host: does he plan to bring in a legislators out to hawaii to set down the agenda for trying to get this bill reconciled? guest:?j that we know of. he is deferring to the leadership in congress, the democratic leadership in the house and senate and that will happen again as i go to a public conference committee to iron out the differences between the senate and house bills. i do not hear any talk that they will bring people physically out to hawaii. . it is quite a complicated assessment we have to make here, but i think as far as dealing with the military, i think he has been careful because he is in contact and seems to be quite possible with the military, too. >> the book is from mount vernon to crawford, the history of presidents and their retreats, its author, ken walsh, chief washington correspondent for u.s. news and world report has been our guest. thank you for being onto program. >> thank you for having me. host: we want to let you know who is on "washington journal" tomorrow, sunday, december 27. barbara slater of "the washington times" an jonathan broder of g.q. weekly will be here to discuss foreign policy and then we will have steven hess from the brookings institution and dan thomasson of scripps howard news service to talk about president obama's first year in office. thank you for watching this edition of "the washington journal" and we will see you tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. eastern. coming up, the communictors, and at 10:30, a senate hearing on the backlog of d.n.a. evidence collected for unsolved rape cases, and later, a former c.i.a. intelligence officer on u.s. policy in afghanistan. tonight, on "america and the courts" encore presentations from c-span's supreme court week special. the supreme court jurn aferlist lyle denison an joan biskubic on covering the courts and appellate attorney maureen maloney on arguing before the court tonight at 7:30 p.m. eastern here on c-span. in the mid '90's, newsweek named omar wasow one of the 50 most influential people to watch in cyberspace and since then he has created the social networking site blackplanet.com and explained new technologies on oprah. sunday night he talks about his current studies at harvard and what's ahead. tomorrow on "news makers" national institutes of health director dr. francis collins on the latest developments in stem cell research, the future of genome technology and how nih may be affected by the healthcare bill making its way through congress. he is interviewed by reporters from usa today and c.q. weekly.com. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2009] cheer clear next, broadband expansion in the united states and blair levine is back at the federal communications commission, this time as the omnibus broadband initiative executive director, and he is our guest this week on "the communictors." amy schotts of the wall street journal is joining in on the questioning. mr. levine, we're about 50-odd days away from the national broadband plan being presented to congress. can you give us a status update on that report? >> sure. as we set out in july, we have been getting status updates all along. in september, we laid out for the f.c.c. where we thought the state of broad broadband was in the united states. in november, we looked at the problems we needed to deal with. a couple weeks ago we looked at how to address those problems and right now, we're in the situation where over the holidays we are busy trying to write up our best view of what is in a very, very extensive record, literally tens of thousands of pages have come in. we have had over 30 workshops where these issues have been debated. we have had a number of field hearings, a number of public notices where we asked people specific questions and we're in the process now of taking all that information in and we will be talking with the commissioner's staff and the commissioners, of course, in january, trying to make a recommendation that will helpfully put our country on the right path toward a very healthy broadband ecosystem over the next ten years. >> what is most important to you in developing this broadband plan? >> well, i think there are a number of things. congress asked for four things specifically. first, they ask in the plan, make sure that we connect all americans. second, that we make sure that there is a plan for having broadband be affordable. third, that it be utilized to the maximum extent, and fourth that we have a plan to assure that broadband is used to solve certain public problems, such as how do we reform healthcare, how do we save energy, how do we improve education, how do we improve job training, so what is most important to me is that we find a way to meet the congressional mandate. >> cost estimates of getting broadband expanded to all americans or to a great majority of americans, vary widely. can you narrow down what you think the cost is right now? >> well, it depends on what you want to do with it. one of the things we did in september was give the preliminary cost estimates. what does it mean to build out a system to what percentage of americans at what speeds. for example, if we think that broadband, if we want to make sure that 90% of americans are receive broadband, you have at least one alternative to receive a broadband speed of ten megabits, it is not clear to me that there is any gap at all. that is to say, i'm not sure we need any new government dollars or even that many new private investment dollars to achieve that goal. on the other hand, if you want to get 100% of americans achieving 100 megabits, that order of magnitude is an incremental investment, either private or public, of about 350 billion, and there is a lot of variation, like whether you want to go to 95% or do you want to go to 25 megabits? our basic view is that the market ought to drive those kinds of decisions almost everywhere, but it is also very clear that there is some percentage of americans, somewhere between five and 10%, who aren't going to receive what we think of as a minimum level of acceptable broad broadband and that's where the government does have to step in. that's where we look to something like universal service to solve that problem. part of the problem in solving the problem is that the current universal system is broken. we have to simultaneously fix it as it is and transition it to support broadband instead of supporting voice. it is a little akin to changing the engine of the jet plane while it is in flight but we're doing our best to figure out how to do that. >> what would you say the minimal level of universal broadband would be? >> we're looking at that now and will be discussing that with the commissioners. as we talked about at the september meeting, there are a number of different use cases for people. generally speaking, i think kind of the market today is about three megabits that. is to say the average american uses it in a way that you need a download speed of 3 megabits to do the kinds of things that most americans do. the use case seems to be increasing at 25% per year in terms of how people use it in terms of the download speeds. we want to have the universalization mechanism produce kind of the minimum that gets us to, i think, about where we are today, maybe a little bit more. there is kind of a big stepup when you go to, like, high definition video and things like. that aim not sure that's what we need, but there is a lot of different elements about what we want people to be able to do but kind of where the step functions are in terms of cost so that if you move up, where do you cost a lot more money, but i think it's somewhere in the kind of order of what people are doing today in terms of what we want to make sure is universal coverage in the next five to ten years. >> so you're talking about 3 megabits per second for folks who don't have high speed right now? >> i think, you know, we're studying the economics, two, three, four, those are all kind of in range, and i might note that, you know, a lot of people say, gee, we ought to have really big goals of 100 megabits to every home. when you look at the countries that have said they're doing that, what they're actually doing is things like 100 megabits to most homes, but in terms of the universalization goal, which is quite different, they are roughly in the order of magnitude of that one, two, three category. >> so recently are rick boucher, head of the house subcommittee released a letter to you guys saying he thought we should have 50 meg megabits per second to 80% of homes in about five years. what do you think of that? do you think that's achievable? >> there are a number of different parameters. for example, his letter said actual speed as opposed to advertised speed. that makes a big difference. again, as we talked about in our september meeting. >> doesn't it make it even harder? >> if it you have it the actual, it is harder. one of the things we want to do -- i think that's a worthy goal but what we want to point out to the decision makers like the congressmen is that, yeah, that's great. if we think we have a path for doing it, here is a path, but if that path requires congress to act in a certain way or the f.c.c. to act in a certain way, here is what they need to do, so you know, i think it's very worthy to kind of stay kind of stretch goals and see what we can do to try to get there, but, again, broadband is primarily a function of private investment. the big news in terms of fixed wireless networks over the next few years will be the investment made by the cable industry and upgrading the network to docsys3. it is not clear it will give it a 50 actual, but at peak times -- not peak in terms of usage but in terms of speed, they probably can get there, but the question is actually whether a goal like that requires a fiber upgrade, and then that depends on whether people like at&t and some others decide to, in response to cable, upgrade their networks. >> mr. levin, you have talked a couple of times about the broadband plan being market driven. >> yes. >> i want to read two criticisms from public interest groups and get your response. >> sure. >> this is from public knowledge , gigi sowen, and there was no discussion of opening telecommunications networks to competitors and no discussion of structural separation of carriers into wholesale and retail components. these are factors that the harvard berkman center told the f.c.c. in a study two months ago were the reasons other countries have surpassed ours and this is from free press and that something has to be done about the duopoly of local cable and telephone companies that control virtually every broadband market in america. >> uh-huh, correct. let me say i have a lot of respect for both public knowledge and free press. i find their criticism not very productive. first of all, as to the unbundling -- the ideas of bundling the structural separation. the berkman study did a fantastic job of pointing out various things that were going on throughout the world, but i think that we asked them to do that. we very much wanted to have an understanding of what was going on in the world, but there are certain things where what is happening in some countries really isn't that germane to helping us figure out where do we go from here? i would just point out as to unbundling, look, the courts threw that out, and we're not that terribly interested in moving towards things which will just freeze capital investment and have long complicated court battles. we may be proposing some things will be challenged. that always happens. i will just say that one doesn't strike me as that productive. structural separation, i haven't heard from anyone in congress or from anyone at the commission or really in the record, people asking for structural separation. but i would also answer both of them by saying that one of the problems i have with their crilts teak is they failed to look at what is really going on in the market. this goes to the other study we asked for which is the study done by the columbia telecom think tank up at columbia university, and what they are pointing out, and it is a really big fact, that there is going to be two major investments in broadband networks in the united states over the next few years. one is, we talked about it just a few seconds ago, the cable industry is updating docsys 3 and two phone companies are upgrading wireless networks for the first time to provide broadband on a wireless mobile basis, so-called lte or 4g, fourth generation. we know those things are going to happen. those are baked in. that's a profound change in market. that is probably the biggest change in the last five years. what we don't know is how consumers will respond to that. we pointed out in the september meeting that if consumers respond to those changes by suddenly saying hey, we really love the greater speed, and we're going to move up to higher levels of speed, cable is going to be in a fabulous position, and in fact, they will actually be the only provider of what will then be the generally accepted broadband. that is an interesting scenario, you know? it is just as plausible that people can react by saying we don't need these higher speeds. we really like the mobility, so instead of moving to docsys 3, we will buy the slightly more expensive wireless mobile but we aren't that interested in the fix because, you know, we only need four or five megabits. we don't know what is going to happen. it seems to me that is a profound thing and if you don't know what is going to happen, the kind of very major surgery that those public interest groups are proposing, which, by the way, again, there is really not much support for it in the record and certainly no support for it on capitol hill and you really have to wonder why, you know, looking at as a practical matter, given what the courts have done, you have to ask yourself, is that really on the table? but the bigger thing is it is really in my view not appropriate to be looking at those kind of things when there is such uncertainty about the market. i think it is great that we have a market that is responding to certain kind of competitive dynamics. people are plairking very big investment bets, moving in different directions, and i think we have to wait and see kind of what happens there. i do think that there are concerns about competition. i don't accept their criticism that we are doing nothing about competition, and indeed, there are a number of things whether it be allowing consumers to know about what kinds of performance they are getting, what kind of performance their neighbors are getting, not their literal neighbors but available in their neighborhood, the spectrum initiative that we have been working on. we don't know whether wireless will ultimately be able to compete with wire. we know if we don't have more spectrum out there the possibility of it competing is almost none. one of the things the report did say which is troubling in terms of competition is that no new wire fixed competitors are really on the horizon, so i think there is certain levels of uncertainty. we're going to try to do all the things we think are pros tiff, but again, i just -- while i have great respect for those two organizations, i don't really accept their criticism as being useful and practical at this time. >> this is comvment span "communictors" program, and our guest is blair levin, broadband executive director with f.c.c. and served as former assistant to reed hunt, former f.c.c. chairman. our questioner is amy schatz from the wall street journal. >> open access became an issue after the berkman study which the f.c.c. asked for. you say there is no support on the hill but there was arguably not that much support on some parts of the hill for net neutrality either. >> i completely agree with you. i'm supportive of net neutrality. >> i think it depends on the party, but when you're talking about competition issues like this, it sounds like you're basically saying that from your perspective, open access is not an issue. unbundling is not an issue, that you think the entity should be going down and that's sort of off the table now. >> no, that's not what i said. we did ask for the berkman study and we gave them complete and total editorial freedom in doing it. we simply asked when we announced it publicly we would like a review of everything that has gone before. we thought that was an important foundation stone for having a data-driven analytic record. they did a lot of things that are very helpful to understanding what is going on, but fundamentally, it's backward looking. it's valuable but fundamentally backward looking, and we also asked the columbia folks to be more forward looking. we thought both foundations were very important. on bundling, it covers a wide spectrum of things. the court threw out certain kinds of unbundling things but there are still still unbundled network elements that are provided for in the law and still exist. there were a certain kind of categories where we will be looking, but kind of the large scale let's say -- let's kind of go backwards to precisely where we were back in 2003, 2002, 2001. that's really not practical. the court decision definitely tied the hands of the f.c.c. moving forward. we have, you know, there is always a choice when you do a plan like this about whether you want to be kind of -- what you want to say, how you want to approach it and we're trying to approach it in a way that is visionary and practical, and the notion, you know, you can say there is not that much support from the hill on net neutrality. i disagree. you can lock look at the committee chairman and subcommittee chairman and admittedly there appears to be a partisan divide about it, but i haven't heard anybody on the hill say that structural separation is where we awed to be heading. by the way, just to be clear, i'm not sure i think it is a good idea either, but that is not the only measure of things. i think that one of the -- you know, there are certain things that are very different about america. in a lot of the countries that thebergman center covered, the tell tell cois the only majority provider of people in the united states we have a telecommunication company and telco company to provide broadband. there is advantages and disadvantages to that, but that's where we are, and we plan on building a plan based on america's strengths and trying to come pe sate for certain kinds of weaknesses but building on where we are. >> soy basically it is cable and phone companies moving forward and they will drive the next generation of broadband and whatever they will be doing to increase their services wherever we are going. are there things the government could do to help those companies increase their offerings? >> first of all, i disagree with the premise of the question. when you look at the broadband universe, you're just talking about the networks. competition, there is a function where there is competition within and between the networks but what we see happening with the broader broadband system is a lot of the innovations, a lot of the job growth, a lot of the investment, a lot of the new applications, those are being driven by other horses, not simply about the networks. the single biggest driver of growth in broadband today is the i-phone. that is driving people to all kinds of uses. it it is -- the demand for spectrum is grow. has gone hugely. the people are experiencing broadband in a completely different way than you would have anticipated prior to the arrival of the i-phone, and by the way, i think even apple itself didn't anticipate it, because when they originally came out with the i-phone, they weren't really creating a platform for the application. that kind of developed later a