Warm twwelcome to our cspan audience. Im a selfconfessed cspan junkie. 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. It 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, 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 must attend event 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, its also on our website if you need another copy or want to download it near the top of our home page. 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 ripe for charting a free market oriented direction for Communications Law and policy. As most of you know, at the fcc under the leadership of new chairman who will be with us for our lunch session today, the agency is already charting a new free market oriented direction. Well be spending a lot of time today, of course, talking about the implications of this new course, including what it means for innovation and investment, but 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 the conversation that im going to have with fcc chairman at lunchtime, we have a stellar lineup for todays program. The First Program will feature howard gelanski and boyden gray. In your program you see the titles and bios. Then were going to follow this session with an all star 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. Then were going to have a conversation with chairman pie. Were honored to have the two acting directors of the federal trade commission with us for the after lunch session. Its ted libski 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 advisoradvisol offer some final thoughts. Now, remember to tweet if youre a tweet er. The handle i think we have the twitter handle on each table but its hashtag sffconf9. And then before we get started i just want to take a second to acknowledge and thank some of our Staff Members that are here. Ckathy baker is our events coordinator. 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. So seth is going to be moderating the program after lunch and Research Fellow mike horney. And then finally i want to introduce to you our newest senior fellow, ted blama. Ted joined us in mid march. Ted is a phd economist and a lawyer and really combines the law and economic expertise. Ted, if you could just stand up so people will see you, who you are. [ applause ]. Finally i want to thank my life lauri. She actually does an awful lot of work for the Free State Foundation that goes unrecognized, a lot of behind the scenes work. When i say that, im not even referring to 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 lauri does and maybe you could thank her with me. [ applause ]. With that, lets get started with our first session. Im going to introduce our speakers first. With their indulgence and yours too, im going to hit some of the highlights that are in their bios. Again, i refer you to the more complete bios in the brochure. Our initial speaker and really keynoter for the day is howard gelanski. Howard is a professor of law at Georgetown University law school and a partner as well at the davis polk law firm. And importantly for our purposes today of course, hes the former administrator 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 as the regulatory czar. Im not sure whether howard likes to be a czar or not, but thats the fact. And 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 advisors during president clintons administration. So again and howard as well as ted blah ma has a phd in economics and also a law degree. The topic of this session and you will see how howard and the next speaker im going to introduce have the experience and expertise to talk about it. Its Lessons Learned improving regulation and government administration. Its hard to find someone more qualified than howard to talk about that along with boyden gray whos going to be the commenter reactor to howards comments after howard delivers some opening remarks. Now, c. Boyden gray is the Founding Partner of boyden gray and associateassociates. Hes a former u. S. Ambassador to the European Union and a former white house counsel. Also very pertinent to our program today, he was counsel back in the first bush administration, george h. W. Bush to the president ial task force of 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, that once youre an ambassador, that that title never lee leaves you, that you always ambassador. If i forget to refer to you as ambassador, i ask your indulgence with that. The other thing i want to say about boyden before we get started is he left off of his resume probably the most important what i think is the most important position that he held during his illustrious career. A former chair of the section of Administrative Law and regulatory practice of the aba. That might not strike you as being as important as ambassador to the e. U. , but im a former chair of that section as well of the aba. So i considered that to be important. Boyden, when i was serving my year as head of the section of Administrative Law, i was asked whether i could be ambassador to the e. U. At that time and because i had that other job i had to decline that. 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 boydens reactions. Good morning. Thanks very much, randy. Its a real honor to be here and share the podium with you and boyden, whos really a founder of Regulatory Reform in the executive branch. Anybody who has worked in my position has sort of a pantheon of people who are founders and foundational thinkers in the area and boyden is certainly one of them. What i want to talk about today is regulatory process and Regulatory Reform. I think there are some Lessons Learned, at least that i learned over the last four years in the Obama Administration doing regulatory review about whats hard about regulation, what works and what doesnt work and why we need to be very careful when we embark on a series of fixes through legislation or other kinds of means, because theres some very good things in our regulatory system, theres some things that can use fixing, but fixing them is hard and were going to want to proceed very carefully. I think thats an Important Message to get across right now, that there is 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, back up, try a different path and also that we dont rust too quickly into legislation that is actually an inferior regulatory system. 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 was to go around the world, often with our ambassad ambassador and to negotiate with foreign governments or entities on Regulatory Reform issues on regulatory harmonization issues. In many places regulation happens completely out of a black box. Theres some kind of summary of a rule or description of intent to regulate, some 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 which one could 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 rule has to go out for Public Notice and comment. The agency then has to issue a final rule that is built upon the record that includes that notice and comment 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. Lots of rules get remanded or struck down in court. Sure thats a costly process. But if you think of the incentives that it generates down through the stream for agencies to do a good job in rule making, one could see that its not a bad system. The public is involved early on and the public has a chance to call the agency to account at the ends. That is rare. Not only that, but the public gets to comment on is the rule. What the public gets to see in support of that rule, especially if its an economically significant rule, is the Regulatory Impact analysis. Not a white paper describing rule, not a white paper describing what some people think the effects might be, but the analysis, things that can get challenged, thinged 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, even if not costless, a 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 about things 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 only 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 that regulations that agencies issue address problems that are genuine. That is to say occurring or very likely to occur. Sometimes one sees regulation that is well meant to get ahead of a problem to stop it before it starts. But without sufficient grounding to ensure that the problem is actually going to occur. That is a very Weak Foundation on which to do regulation because then the benefits are always a difficult thing to make salient 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. 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 to begin with, the benefits of the regulation are contingent on the problem actually occurring. Agencies could do a better job making that case. Its not typically what agencies are set up to do. Look at their statutory authorization. They look to a man dadate from congress or some event that has happened out there and they respond. The communications aspect of explaining what theyre doing and way theyre doing it is not always done very well. Sometimes thats because thats a hard case to make. Thats all the more reason agencies should have to get out there and make the case. Identifying a real problem and communicating and making that case convincingly i think is the first step in rule making. The next step is to identify potential Effective Solutions to that problem. And i Say Solutions because again another shortcoming that i find even within our overall quite good regulatory system is agencies tend to move very quickly towards a solution to a problem. That is not always the case by any stretch of the imagination. But one of the things that ive found as administrator was 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. Regulatory alternatives are important, discussing them, even analyzing them in a quite rigorous way, because they show the public when the rule goes out for notice and comment, what are the other things that the agencies thought about and rejected or at least became less convinces were appropriate solutions to the problem. Different alternatives will have different cost benefit profiles. Different alternatives will elicit different kind of data and comments from the public. And actually the agency may find out that something 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 should pursue one of those alternatives. Identifying potential Effective Solutions to that problem and even if the agency proposed 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 la regulatory review in the executive branch. I can throw out a lot of orders. 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 very 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 to determine that the proposed solution and indeed any alternatives that might be discussed and offered up as possible proposals or possible rules down the road proposed solutions should not impose costs that outweigh the benefits. That would be a disaster for a number of reasons. First of all, there are rules that this society chooses to put in place that have nonquantifiable benefits, distributional objectives, fairness objectives, objects of social inclusiveness. One may agree or disagree politically with those objectives, but if they are disclosed, if they are well achieved by the rule and if the rule says part of the reason were going to achieve these costs is so that same sex families in the military can have access to base housing and feel more included and be better soldiers, how do you put a dollar value on that . Pretty darn hard to do so. Its a dignitary interest. Theres not a quantifiable benefit. You would not be able to have that rule if you had a rigid quantified beftds out way quanti out weigh thats squishy. That said, i do think its important that the public know very clearly what it is paying to get those kinds of benefits. So the disclosure of costs, all costs that could be quantified or identified even if not well quantity tfied that are going t incurred in the pursuit of those benefits, as a matter of democratic process have to be put out there clearly and transparently. Agencies hate to disclose costs and they love to tout benefits. One of the jobs of a Regulatory Review Office is to right that balance. Now, i think were actually going to see some very interesting things happen under some of president trumps executive orders. If one has to repeal two rules to issue a new rule, something thats at least aspirationally sought in one of the president s executive orders will be quite hard to do. Were going to see the agencies flipping on costs and benefits as they come forward urging repeal of certain rules. To repeal a rule, you have to make a rule. You have to make a rule repealing the old rule. Under the admin