Telecommunication policy conference in washington at the National Press club. Thats where fcc chair pie was joined by Administration Officials and leaders. Well show you about three hours of this conference and well start with the discussion on the future of the internet. Okay. Well, everyone is so quiet that i think we should get started. That was really that was really good. Im randy may, president of the Free State Foundation, and im pleased to welcome you to the Free State Foundations ninth annual Telecom Policy conference. I want to extend an especially warm welcome to our cspan audience. Im a selfconfessed cspan junkie. Some of you may have heard me say that before. My mom, may she rest in peace, she always worried when i told her i was a cspan junkie, not really knowing what i meant by that, but im always pleased and grateful when cspan is here, and welcome to the cspan audience. This years annual Conference Follows on the heels of the tenth Anniversary Gala last december. So with next years annual conference well be in double digits for this event, too, which just confirms the old adage that time flies when youre having fun, and i might add when youre busy, as well. Almost every year, i say, some of you know this, i say that our annual Telecom Policy conference just keeps getting bigger and better and more impactful. Well, as long as it remains true, im going to keep saying it. Even though we had to reschedule this years conference because our first date, march 14th happened to be the only snowy day this winter in washington, i think this years conference upholds the tradition. A quick glance at the Program Shows why the conference is a mustattend, vent for anyone interested in communications, internet and hightech law and policy. I know you will agree we have an Outstanding Group of speakers and program sessions. The program that you have here is also on our website if you need another copy or want to download it near the top of our homepage. The theme for this years conference is a new direction for communications policy. Less regulation, more investment and innovation. With a new fcc and a new congress in place, the opportunity is right for charting a free marketoriented direction for communications, law and policy. As most of you know, at the fcc under the leadership of new chairman pi who will be with us for our lunch session today, the agency is already charting a new free marketoriented direction. Well be talking about the implications about this new course including what it means for innovation and most importantly what it means for our nations consumers. I have a hunch that at one time or another today the subject of the fccs new Net Neutrality proceeding or open internet proceeding as the previous fcc chairman preferred or restoring Internet Freedom proceeding as the current fcc chairman prefers, in any event that proceeding by whatever name you want to call it im sure will come up, and it should because its an important proceeding for the fcc. Aside from what well have with the fcc chairman we have a stellar lineup for todays program. It will feature those, and then well follow this session with an allstar panel lineup and then immediately following the Panel Session were going to break a short time for a very nice buffet lunch. I guarantee you its going to be nice, but i hope most of you are here for the program and not just for the lunch. And then were going to have a conversation with chairman pai and we are honored to have the two acting directors of the federal trade commission with us after the lunch session and thats tom lipski and tom paul will be featured at that session, and then winding up, Michelle Connolly who is a professor at Duke University and a member of the Free State Foundations board of academic advisers will offer some final thoughts. Now, remember to tweet, if youre a tweeter, the handle i think we have the twitter handle on each table, but its fsfconf9 which should call to mind fsf conference 9, thats fsfconf9. Before we get started i just want to take a second to acknowledge and thank some of our Staff Members that are here. Kathy baker is our Events Coordinator and communications coordinator, and she has an awful lot to do with this event, and we appreciate her. Lets give a round of applause if we could for kathy. [ applause. And then i want to acknowledge the scholarly work by two of our Staff Members that are here and their contribution, senior fellow seth cooper. Seth will be monitoring the program after lunch and mike hornie. Their contribution and work at the Free State Foundation is very, very important, and then, finally, i want to introduce to you on the newest senior fellow ted bolima. Ted joined us in midmarch. Ted is a ph. D economist and a lawyer, and really combines the law and economic expertise. Ted, if you could just stand up so people will see who you are. [ applause so thanks to all of them, and finally, i want to thank as i often do, but sometimes forget to do, my wife lori. She actually does an awful lot of work for the Free State Foundation that goes unrecognized a lot of behind the scenes work, and when i say that what she does tolerating without too much grumbling the often insane hours that i put in really for the Free State Foundation. So i appreciate everything that lori does, and maybe you could thank her with me. [ applause ] okay, with that, lets get started with our first session, and im just going to introduce our speakers first, with their indulgence and yours, too, ill hit some of the highlights that are in their bios, but again, ill refer you to the more complete bios in the brochure. Our initial speaker and keynoter for the day is howard chilanski. Howard is a professor of law at Georgetown University law school, and a partner, as well of the davis polk law firm, and importantly for our purposes today, of course, hes the former administrator in the in president Obamas Administration of the office of information and Regulatory Affairs which is within the office of management and budget. That position is often referred to the regulatory czar, whether howard likes to be a czar or not, but thats the facts, and howa howard again, just briefly, hes a former director of the ftcs bureau of economics, and he also served previously as chief economist of the fcc from 1999 to 2000, and a senior economist for the president s council of economic advisers during president clintons administration. So again, and howard, as well as ted bolima have degrees in both hes got a ph. D in economics and also a law degree. By the way, not sure i mentioned it, but the topic of this session and youll see how howard and the next speaker im going to introduce have the experience and expertise to talk about it is Lessons Learned in proving regulation and government administration. So its hard to find someone more qualified than howard to talk about that along with bowden gray who will be the commenter and reactor to howards comments after howard delivered some opening remarks. C. Boyden gray is the Founding Partner of boyden gray and associates. Hes a former u. S. Ambassador to the european union, and a former white House Counsel and also very pertinent to our program today. He was counsel back in the first bush administration, george h. W. Bush, to the president to the president ial task force on regulatory relief for which he wrote the original executive order 12291. We dont want to get hung up on numbers here, and i have a hard time remembering, but he can fill us in on what that was. Boyden, someone told me once when i had another ambassador on our program, we had a few that once youre an ambassador that that title never leaves you, that youre always ambassador. So if i forget to boyden is a longtime friend of mine, if i dont refer to you as ambassador ill ask your indulgence with that. The other thing about bowden before we get started, he left off of his resume, its left off of his official bio what i think is the most important position that he held during his illustrious career is the former chair of the section of Administrative Law and regulatory practice of the aba. That might not strike you as being as important as, you know, ambassador to the eu, but im a former chair of that section, as well as the aba, and i consider that to be important. Its just a oneyear deal, but when i was serving my year as head of the section of Administrative Law i was asked whether i wanted could be ambassador to the eu at that time, and because i had that other job. I had to decline that, but i wasnt able to do it, but anyway, now you know about his other position. So with that introduction, im going to turn it over to howard to get us started and then well get bowdens reactions. Good morning. Thanks very much, randy. Its a real honor to be here and to share the podium with you and with boyden who is really, in some ways, just a founder of regulatory review and Regulatory Reform in the executive branch, and is somebody who anybody who has worked in my position at elvira has served a pantheon of people who are founders and foundational thinkers in the area and boyden is certainly one of them. What i want to the talk about today is regulatory process and Regulatory Reform, and i think there are some Lessons Learned, at least that i learned over the last four years in the Obama Administration doing regulatory review, but whats hard about regulation, what works and what doesnt work and why we need to be very careful when we embark upon a series of fixes through legislation or other kinds of means because there are very good things in our regulatory system and there are things that can use fixing, but fixing them is hard and well want to proceed very carefully, and i think that thats an Important Message to get across right now that there is, i think a lot of fairly radical rethinking of the federal governments regulatory program. I tend to think radical rethinkings are good things because they stir things up and they get people thinking, but as long as people think with a cool head and are willing to acknowledge that some steps they may take are wrong and try a different path and also so that we dont rust too quickly into legislation that locks us into what is an inferior regulatory system. So i would start with the premise that the United States has probably the best, most transparent and most accountable system of regulatory process in the world. One of the jobs i had as administrator was to go around the world, often with our ambassador our ustr mike freeman and to negotiate with foreign governments or entities on Regulatory Reform issues and regulatory harm issues, and one of the things that made that very difficult is in many places, regulation happens completely out of a black box. Theres some kind of a summary of a rule or some kind of description of an intent to regulate and some kind of preliminary report about what the effects of the rule will be and then boom, a regulation pops out of some back room, and there are very few bases on how one can challenge that rule and get it rethought. Compare that to what we have under the administrative procedure act. There are a few exceptions, but by and large an agency has to issue a proposed rule, that proposed rule has to go out for Public Notice and comment. The agency has to issue a final rule that is built upon the record that includes the notis in common and the response that the agency makes to those comments and at the end of it all, the agency is subject to judicial review. This works fairly well. Lots of rules get challenged in court and lots of rules get remanded or struck down in court and sure, thats a costly process, and if you think of the incentives that it generates down for the agencies to do a good job in rule making, one can see its not a bad system. The public is involved early on, and the public has the chance to account for the agency at the end. That is rare. Not only that, but what the public gets to comment on is the rule. The what the public gets to see and say in response to that rule is the deregulatory Impact Analysis and not a white paper describing the rule and not a white paper describing what some people think the effects might be, but the analysis and things that can get challenged and things that can be brought before a court. One wants to think twice before one backs up and fundamentally changes a system that actually has, even if not perfect or costless ashgs pretty good system of transparency and accountability built into it. Its a very rare kind of thing. Let me back up and talk about the things that i think are Lessons Learned and things about we need to fix in regulation and what we might do to come up with an even better regulatory system going forward. So what is the job of a regulator or a Regulatory Review Office . I throw that in because that was my job. So the first is to identify a real problem. This may sound like an obvious statement, but it is not always the case, the regulations that agencies issue address problems that are genuine. That is to say, occurring or very likely to occur. Sometimes when they see regulation, thats to get ahead of the problem to stop it before it starts and with insufficient grounding so that the problem is actually going to occur. That is a Weak Foundation on which to do regulation because then the benefits which ill talk about in a minute, are always a difficult thing to make saliant and to prove become even harder because not only are the benefits hard to examine because theyre in the future, theyre highly contingent on the problem even occurring and its very hard to make a good case for regulation and very hard to make a case to the parties that must bear the cost of that regulation when the regulation, and the benefits of the regulation are contingent on a problem actually occurring. So identifying a real problem and having a convincing case that this is a problem that society should solve and bear the cost of solving is the first issue, and ill start by saying i think sometimes there is insufficient attention to making that case. Agencies could do a better job making that case. Its not typically what agencies are set up to do. They look at statutory authorization and they look to mandate from congress or a petition from the congress or some event that has happened out there, any thand they respond. The communications aspect of explaining what theyre doing and why theyre doing it is not always done very well. Sometimes thats because thats a hard case to make. Well, thats all the more reason the agency should have to get out there and have to make the case and that suggests there might not be a real problem or that the problem is one that is too costly to solve so identifying a real problem and communicating and making that case convincingly is the first step in rule making. The next step is to identify potential solutionses to that problem, and i Say Solutions because again, another short coming that i find even within our overall quite good regulatory system is agencies tend to move very quickly toward a solution to a problem. That is not always the case by any stretch of the imagination, but one of the things that i found as administrator of oira is that many proposed rules on very significant issues came into the Office Without much examination of regulatory alternatives beyond the proposal that the agency was making, but regulatory alternatives are important. Discussing them, even analyzing them in a quite vigorous way because they show the public when the rule goes out for notices and comment and what else might be a possible approach . What are the other things that the agencys thought about and rejected or at least became less convinced for appropriate solutions to the problem. There are a number of reasons one wants to do that. Different alternatives will have different cost benefit profiles. Different alternatives will elicit different data and comments from the public and the agency may find out that something that they, inside their sort of closed circle of people working on the rule, they may find that theres information that convinces them they made a mistake, that they may pursue one of those alternatives and go back to the drawing board. So identifying potential Effective Solutions to that problem and even if the Agency Proposes one of those to nonetheless, be transparent in discussing and explaining what alternatives there might be. This, by the way, is in the executive orders that govern regulatory review in the executive branch. Theyve been there, i can throw out a lot of numbers, executive order 1266, executive order 13610 and all of these great executive orders that actually since president reagan every administration regardless of Political Party has seen fit to reiterate and strengthen on similar principles of regulatory review so alternatives are a big one. Now, the third thing that im about to identify here is probably in some sense the most controversial, and that is determined that the proposed solution and indeed alternatives that are offered up as possible proposals or possible rules down the road, proposed solu