Transcripts For CSPAN Telecommunications Policy Conference P

The Free State Foundations annual telecommunications conference. 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. The open internet proceeding. We did hear a little bit during the previous session. I will call this the allstars panel. I am not sure i came up with another name. We do have a group of allstars here. We are going to the digging in 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. I want to welcome those of you 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. Once again, 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. She joined ctia as its president in june of 2014. She previously served in the bush administration, as the 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 was so easy going, it made it 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 david cohen. He is the Senior Executive Vice 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 law school, actually, he was 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 comcast, i suppose. We are glad to have you with us as well. Next is kim keenan. This is the first time kim has 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 naacp. For many of our conferences, we have had one of your predecessors from mmtc with us, and even before the name was changed. Thankfully, the acronym remained the same. I have always thought it was important for our purposes here to have the perspective of mmtc so im glad you are here with us as well. Next, 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 broadband is our czar. We are old friends. We are old, but we are also friends. Weve got different views about a lot of the issues we are going to discuss. We have a lot of common views as well. Sometimes we say to ourselves, dreaming if we were the communications arczar, maybe we 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 Executive Vice President at at t. He is responsible for at ts publicpolicy organization. He has been with at t for a long time. He steps into the shoes of jims 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 to be the fccs priorities or congresss 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. Nearly half of that decline was 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. The scale is going to the connecting everything, everywhere. I had an ahha 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 for what 5g can do. 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. It is going to add to our economy. What do we need to do to get the policies right . In the last 30 years, the Wireless Industry built 150, 000 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. That includes sitting. We need to have Affordable Access and streamline the process. We are going to need more 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. We won the race in 4g and we 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 Communications Policy issues to 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] david im going 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 investment and innovation for the ecosystem. The private sector has invested 1. 5 trillion. That is twice the per capita investment rate that exists in europe. We have developed open and accessible networks. Open and accessible an openended and accessible internet. It is hard to look at it any fcc 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. Not in unraveling that neutrality rules. No matter how many times the opponents of his actions say it, it does not make it true. Getting rid of title ii does not mean getting rid of neutrality. You can support and Net Neutrality rules that you do not have to do that under title ii. Which brings me to my second 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. That is what 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 technologys we need to figure out 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 have broadband buildout to their homes compared to those that did not have access because the broadband has not been built out. We need to keep our eye on the 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. We wont end up with lots of federal dollars going into a bucket where you cant even quantify how many additional americans were signed up for the america 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 at t and comcast. If we keep our eye on those overarching policies, we can make progress. Randolph thank you very much. Now we will turn it to kim. Kim im going to pick up where david 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 access, effectively the not just 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. We care about ownership and 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. We have the system that is the envy of the world. We have to make sure every american has this opportunity. In 2020, there are going to be millions of jobs in the digital 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. However i take on these issues, 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 loved one is in a jail. 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. It is when theyre is going to be a next disaster, not if. When 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. I want us to think about that, too. As david just said, we have the capacity, we have the talent. We can make this. Randolph thank you. Blair is going to be next. When i said we are old friends, i didnt mean too imply you are as old as i am. Blair as a matter of political capital, it is obvious we will spend most of it on Net Neutrality. Are the 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. One of the things i think is 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 about what the whether what 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. I have to 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. The next three years are going to be very important. There is going to be a wave of consolidation. The question is, what is allowed and what is not allowed. I think 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. Randolph bob will be last. I want to be remind you, we do have a twitter handle. It is on your brochure. Feel free to tweet, if you would like. Bob. Bob is there a reason you did the twitter thing right before i spoke . Randolph i have heard you are a tweeter. Bob thank you for inviting me. For the record, i am not as old as either of these guys. All the good things have been said. I couldnt agree more with the focus of meredith and david and kim on deployment and adoption. I agree with the blair, consolidation is going to be on everybodys mind. Certainly in virtually every news story that comes out in this space, and i think it is going to dominate the press for a while. But the area i would go to, and it really kind of echoes the comments that meredith made about 5g, the way we create jobs in the telecommunications space is we dig up streets. When meredith talks about needing 150,000 small cell 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 at the top of the list. I think the percentages they pay in Corporate Income tax are very high. If we can reform that, and reform the tax code to free up more capital for investment,