And journalist matt life from 3 00 a. M. Eastern on sunday. Next, a look at the future of the internet and sec regulations. A policy cant conference in washington dc. This is an hour and a half. Ok, we are going to get started now. One minute. If everyone will take their seats, please. You become so quiet when i say that that i should not even wait the full minute. That is fantastic. We are going to get started now. I think that was a terrific session to get the conference started, talking about regulation more generally, although i knew there would be. I think throughout the day we are going to hear about that neutrality, or restoring internet freedom. Internet proceeding. Did hear a little bit during the previous session. Call this the allstars panel. I am not sure i came up with another name. We do have a group of allstars here. Inare going to the digging to Certain Communications issues. I want to do brief introductions. Everyone here has the brochure where we have got the full bios there. The brochure is also on the website, for those of you in our cspan audience. Those of youcome in our cspan audience. We are very pleased cspan is covering the conference today. What im going to do is introduce of the beckley alphabetically our panelists. Im going to ask them to speak in that order, that is probably as good as any other order. Meredith baker finds herself in that spot. Im going to give you the brief version of their bio and maybe Say Something personal. They have a lot more you can read about in the official brochure. Our first speaker is meredith baker. President ctia as its in june of 2014. She previously served in the as theministration, acting assistant secretary of commerce for communications as Information Communications and information. While at ntia, she did a lot of important things. One thing meredith did that may be forgotten, but it is very important, she really is the person that facilitated and led the transition at that period to the Digital Television format. It made itasy going, seem as if it might not have been as difficult and as much work as wedded to it. There were a lot of people that preceded meredith to make that happen. I will always recall that because it was very important at the time. The other thing i will say about meredith that i always like to point out, in case she forgets, she upon becoming a commissioner gave her maiden address at a Free State Foundation conference, which was nice enough. She had to come back from south america and goes straight she came straight from the airport into another room here at the press club to deliver that speech. And it was a good one, as well. I appreciate that. Next, after meredith, we have cohen. Vice the Senior Executive president at comcast and the chief diversity officer. He has a broad portfolio of responsibilities including government regulatory affairs, legal affairs, corporate administration, and community investment. I dont know what you do during the rest of your day. By the way, when david was in he wasool, actually, known as chief Justice David cohen. He and my brother were in law school together. David not at duke, for the record. Randolph not at duke, but everyone makes mistakes. My brother didnt actually tell me that, it is on wikipedia. It says david he was known as chief Justice David cohen because of his intellect and the work ethic his responsibilities tell you something about his work ethic. I do know from my brother, because they were partners in a law firm together, david was the managing partner and it was not unusual at all to get emails at 3 00 in the morning. That probably still happens around caomcast, i suppose. We are glad to have you with us as well. Next is kim keenan. Kim hasthe first time been with us. Kim is ceo of the multicultural council. What i would say to you, because i dont know much about your Law School Career i know kim is also a former general counsel for the and aa cp. The naacp. For many of our conferences, we have had one of your us,ecessors from mmtc with and even before the name was changed. Thankfully, the acronym remained the same. I have always thought it was important for our purposes here mtchave the perspective of m so im glad you are here with us as well. Ext, we have blair blair serves as executive director of gig u. I guess that is his university affiliation. I mentioned about howard, when i introduced him this morning, i said his position is often referred to as the regulatory czar. Blair was head of the National Broadband plan. He always points out it was 18 effort. He was a leader. Some of us thought of him as the czar. And is our we are old friends. We are old, but we are also friends. Views aboutfferent a lot of the issues we are going to discuss. Lot of common views as well. Ourselves,e say to dreaming if we were the czar, maybe we a could do it together and come up with a halfway decent act. I am glad you are with us today. Last but not least, bob quinn. Bob is Senior ExecutiveVice President at at t. He is responsible for at ts publicpolicy organization. For a long with at t time. Of jimsinto the shoes m, who we have the pleasure of having with us on many occasions. It is a pleasure you are here as well, bob. Now what we are going to do, i have asked each of these three excuse me, each of our panelists just take three minutes initially to give us their perspective on what ought fccs priorities or priorities with Communications Law and policy. I know that is fairly broad. Sometimes they talk about what they want to, but i am going to enforce this threeminute limit. That is going to give us a basis. I am absolutely certain to have a Good Exchange back and forth. I know i have some questions and i will try to save some time for questions from the audience. Have an informative and i think interesting discussion with these allstars. Ms. Baker, why dont you start us off. Meredith it is a pleasure to be here with this esteemed panel. It is my birthday, so i am only going to answer questions i want to. [applause] meredith i think we are going to hear a lot about Net Neutrality and privacy. I think we are closer than a lot of people think they are. I dont know how many of you saw this article in the wall street journal, about 10 days ago. It is talking about the Consumer Price index falling surprisingly from april to april. Wasly half of that decline traced to wireless telephone services. Think about that, a slowdown of inflation was caused by smartphone price declines. Our consumer bills went down 12. 9 because of competition last year. I think that is remarkable for two main reasons. I think the size of the Wireless Industry to affect the economy is interesting and important. I also think the fact that the power of competition to save americans money is also important. That power of competition is also driving the market in wireless to do the next thing, 5g. What i want to do is talk about what 5g is. What impact 5g is going to have on our lives. And then talk about what policies we need to have to get there. What is 5g . I think we have heard this feed is going to be remarkable. 100 times the speed we have today. That is Home Broadband speed. Thescale is going to connecting everything, everywhere. Hha moment when i was at intel and i looked at their prototype a ton this car. It had 200 sensors and five hd cameras. We are talking vehicle to neighborhood. That is a lot of data are 4g network could not handle. That is another reason we are building these 5g networks. The transformative thing is the realtime effect of it. There is virtually no lag time in five g. With that can do, its applications in health care with remote surgeries or transportation, energy savings, i like to say i think we are only limited by our imagination can do. 5g eccentric tells us it is going to bring 3 million new jobs. That means one in every hundred americans is going to be employed by our industries. Add to our to economy. What do we need to do to get the policies right . In the last 30 years, the 150,000 industry built towers. We need to double that in small cells growth for the next few years. To do that, to build these new networks for 5g, we need new rules. Siting. Ludes we need to have Affordable Access and streamline the process. Moree going to need spectrum. There is nothing in the pipeline right now. It needs to be internationally harmonized. It is going to be to 75 billion to build these networks. We need policies that incent that. There are trials in the United States, trials all over the world. 4g and we race in need to in 5g. David thanks very much and it is a pleasure to be here. I like it when you ask us to distill the complex tomunications policy issues three minutes. You would never hold yourself to that standard, but maybe between the five of us, we can hope to cover some of the brett of the policy issues that are on the top of the pile, if you will. Randolph you have about two minutes and 30 seconds. [laughter] to focus on two higherlevel policies. I look at the current internet ecosystem. It is the envy of the world. I dont think there is any country or continent that has been able to develop the internet ecosystems and we have that we have in the United States. It is because of a consistent, light regulatory touch developed by republican and democratic administrations up until the last five years or so. The number one priority, i think, for our company, for our industry, i think for everyone on this panel and meredith alluded to it, is to figure out how we keep the United States on the leading edge of invest i tment and innovation for the ecosystem. Investedte sector has 1. 5 trillion. That is twice the per capita investment rate that exists in europe. We have developed open and accessible networks. Npen and accessible a andende accessible internet. Ct is hard to look at it any fc action, within the window of a new cycle or two, or even a year or two, but the legacy of the five years of the Obama Administration will be an unexplained, unnecessary retrenchment on a policy that was working, when it moved to reclassify broadband under title ii and absolutely undercut the United States advantage for innovation and investment. It is why our number one priority is to support the chairman of the fcc in unraveling that reclassification of broadband. In unraveling that neutrality rules. No matter how many times the opponents of his actions say it, it does not make it true. Ii doesrid of title not mean getting rid of neutrality. You can support and Net Neutrality rules that you do not have to do that under title ii. Secondrings me to my overall priority, once we have this internet ecosystem that is the envy of the world, we have to make sure it is available to everyone. Universal broadband deployment and adoption is all about. I applaud the chairmans focus on this. Whether it is through a combination of further buildout of Wireline Networks or to figure out need a way to get broadband to all america. The numbers always matter. There are about four times as Many Americans who do not have access to the internet today who to theirdband buildout homes compared to those that did not have access because the broadband has not been built out. On the to keep our eye ball for what we are trying to accomplish, which is to sign more people up for the internet. Which means those dollars should be devoted to unserved areas, not socalled underserved areas. Lots of end up with federal dollars going into a bucket where you cant even quantify how many additional americans were signed up for the internet as a result of 6 billion being spent. These are great opportunities for publicprivate partnerships, a combination of federal programs like extension of lifeline to broadband, and private sector programs like merediths companies have, like comcast. If we keep our eye on those erarching policies, we can make progress. Randolph thank you very much. Now we will turn it to can. To kim. Kim im going to pick up where left off. People need to hear there are people who have broadband in front of their home, but they do not have broadband. We spend so much time dividing ourselves and slicing ourselves. If you have kids who live in a community where there is broadband around the corner, at the library, at the fast food place, but they do not have the not justtively left behind, they are left in another place. They dont have an opportunity to be a part of what is going to be a digital economy. Andare about ownership diversity in this space. We also care about making sure every american is connected. We spend so much time all of this is lost. To have these people saying, you are giving away something for free. You are going to have a Walled Garden and they are only going to have a little bit of the internet. If you let somebody in your garden, they are coming to your house. We need to be focused on that. We cannot lose sight of the fact that we have americans who do not have this. I had the opportunity to go to brussels. That is thesystem envy of the world. We have to make sure every american has this opportunity. In 2020, there are going to be the digitaljobs in space. How you get your education is important. If you have a kid and they are not using the internet to do their homework, i dont know who they are going to compete with in the future. That is our number one opportunity. I care about that. Issues,i take on these you know that we are thinking about the people that do not have this. They are not sexy issues. The prison phone, the notion people would pay more to make a longdistance call because their jail. One is in a that is not a popular issue. Why . That says a lot that we would charge families a tax on their pain. Why are we stripping revenue for that when it could go to broadband or Something Else . Other things people dont think about, they are fighting about open neutrality. They are not thinking about multilingual Emergency Alert systems. Is going tohere be a next disaster, not if. People cannot broadcast in languages in the community, we do them to not being found. We doomed the people to going to get them to having to do it under the worst conditions. That, us to think about too. We have thet said, capacity, we have the talent. We can make this. Thank you. Blair is going to be next. When i said we are old friends, o imply you are as old as i am. As a matter of political capital, it is obvious we will spend most of it on Net Neutrality. Issues in about 155 other broadband plans around the world, how do you get more affordable broadband . That is where the focus ought to be. Think ise things i consistent with a lot of other folks have said, i would note when you understand the economics as well as kind of the social elements of those questions, a lot of it resides in cities, not the federal government. We could argue and maybe we well whether whate the federal government is doing is helping citizens move in the right direction or Something Else. But that is the focus of what i have been doing. Say, most of the money i made in my life i made on wall street. From a wall street perspective, there is really only one question, how far is consolidation allowed to go . We will look at the next three years from the perspective of 10 years from now. Goingxt three years are to be very important. There is going to be a wave of consolidation. The question is, what is allowed and what is not allowed. The conditions are much less relevant. That, as meredith said, what competition has done to the Wireless Industry and what that has done to the economy, if Market Structure is the single most important issue, and that will be tested in a variety of ways in the next couple of years. Bob will be last. Remind you, we do have a twitter handle. It is on your brochure. To tweet, if you would like. Bob. Bob is there a reason you did the twitter thing right before i spoke . I have heard you are a tweeter. For inviting me. For the record, i am not as old as either of these guys. A lot of good things have been said. I couldnt agree more with the focus of meredith and david and can on the club and kim on deployment and adoption. I think it is going to dominate the press for a while. The area i would go to, and it really kind of echoes the comments that meredith made about 5g, the way we create jobs commissions space is weations dig up streets. When merited talks about needing ,000 cell phone towers, this is how we really create jobs across the board. I think tax reform is going to be a dominant policy. If you look at the tax rates paid by the largest investors, Telecommunications Companies are the top of the list. The percentages they pay and Corporate Income tax are very high. That, and reformat reform the tax code to free up more capital for investment, but also to change the way we look at some of the investment that is made, that would go a long to toward clearing the way building the five g networks of the future. When you pick about the five g networks, we always think about Wireless Infrastructure and cell towers that cover multiple miles, 23 miles of coverage. In these small cell world, we are going to need fiber. Particularly in densely populated areas, every couple hundred meters. That is going to involve serious digging up streets. We are going to have to be able to get into their rightsofway in order to deploy that fiber. We going to have a lot of issues. Verizon is not on the panel, but i know when verizon wanted to do fios 10 years ago, menu municipalities did not have the right attitude. When google entered the fiber business, it changed the way some municipalities think about it. We are already seeing summer change meant some rich etrenchment in the area of small cell. If we lead in 5g deployment, will lead in