Interviews/Profiles

Republican FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell thanked the agency's broadband task for that worked tirelessly to create the report, which will be handed to Congress tomorrow.

But in his statement at today's FCC meeting, he pointed out some ideas in the plan that "give me concern:"

---First, the Plan opens the door to classifying broadband services as old-fashioned monopoly era, circuit-switched, voice telephone services under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934.  Broadband deployment and adoption have flourished in the absence of such regulations.  Not only do I doubt that such a reclassification would survive appeal, I don’t see how foisting a regulatory framework first devised in the 19th Century would help a competitive 21st Century marketplace continue to thrive.  But we will have plenty of time to engage in this debate.

---Second, the Plan implies that the Commission should mandate the unbundling of fiber and other network elements that have been deployed since the agency deregulated some of these components.  As a result of that deregulation, fiber deployment has spiked in recent years.  Rather than reverse course, the Commission should ensure that any future actions will not create regulatory uncertainty and litigation risk that could scare away capital investment.

Mark McLaughlin, CEO of VeriSign, is hosting the 25th Anniversary party today for dot-com, the domain name that revolutionized the way Americans do business back in 1985.

In a quick chat, I got his perspective on the Internet's past and future.

You've been at VeriSign for about a decade now. What's the biggest change you've seen since then?

I think the best is yet to come in terms of the usefulneess of the web. Not because I have a crystal ball, but if I look back over the last 10 years, through the boom and the bust, there was a really interesting thing to me at that time. I noticed that at the worst point of the dot-com bust that the growth rate for payments on the internet was growing at a really fast rate. Read more...

Chuck Reed, the mayor of San Jose, Calif., wants to make his city the capital of clean tech innovation. His goal is to create 25,000 clean tech jobs in the next 15 years.

He also wants to reduce the per capita energy use in the city by 50 percent, and build or retrofit 50 million square feet of green buildings in the same time period.

But these goals require some help from the federal government. In his latest visit to Washington, Reed made a case for faster assistance in growing the clean tech economy.

Hillicon Valley had a short conversation with him.

What was the main purpose of your trip to D.C.?

We meet regularly with our local delegation, but we also met with departments that are relevant to the programs we do.

This time, our number one priority was the Department of Energy's loan guaranatee program. We have 10 companies that are trying to participate in the loan guarantee program.

That would represent $800 million to $1 billion going to the private sector in San Jose along with thousands of jobs.

Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) has big plans this year. He wants to reform the nearly $8 billion-a-year fund to subsidize internet services. He also wants to enact the first online privacy legislation. That's not all--he also wants to push the Spectrum Inventory Act through the House and hold a number of oversight hearings on the FCC's National Broadband Plan.

All the while, Boucher will be campaigning against a Republican challenger for his seat. As chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet, he has a lot to accomplish in Washington while also defending the seat he has held for 28 years.

He is the 10th most powerful member of the House, but he faces a tough race in southern Virginia. Republicans have attacked him for his support of cap-and-trade legislation, despite his district's roots in coal-mining. And critics say he has been in Washington so long he has lost touch with his constituency.

Hillicon Valley sat down with him last week to hear about his upcoming agenda and his campaign.

What's on your agenda this year?

First is reforming the Universal Service Fund (USF). I'm putting comprehensive legislative reform together. We've put out a disussion draft and now we're modifiying it based on feedback (from the last hearing). We hope to have that bill ready for mark-up in the subcomittee certainly with in the month.

I am also working with the Republican members of the committee on a bill to provide the first set of privacy safeguards for internet users. That will follow behind USF. Those two legislative items you can expect to be in the subcommittee this year.

My interview with Kyle McSlarrow, head of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, aired tonight on C-SPAN. Here's a clip of his reaction to Google's broadband experiment and his thoughts on what it means for the cable industry. 

"They're not planning on turning themselves into an internet provider. It's an experiment," he said.

"We make available today... much more than a gigabit of capacity of data. we're using it for high speed Internet, a lot of video, phone and other interactive services....but over time... as demand calls for it, we can start switching more and more capacity to the Internet side," he said. "We're already rolling out the fastest national broadband plan in America. That's not an announcement. That's real world, today."

You can watch the full interview here. 

NBC Universal executive vice president and general counsel Rick Cotton ruffled some feathers Thursday when he suggested that Internet service providers (ISPs) should take stronger steps to curb the flow of illegal content on their broadband networks.

Using web filtering technologies is one method an ISP could utilize to prevent pirated music and movies from being downloaded illegally. Cotton did not endorse web filtering as the best option, though he did say it would be possible to use filters without violating consumers' privacy rights.

I had a separate conversation with Cotton, who chairs the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's coalition to combat piracy. Here are excerpts from our chat.

What is your 2010 agenda for strengthening intellectual property enforcement?

In terms of the Chamber and the coalition against counterfeiting and piracy,... we embrace putting together a government-wide strategy to reduce counterfeiting and digital theft.  We applaud the development of that plan [by the administration] and call for it to be submitted to Congress next summer.

The Chamber identified two major focal points for our anti-counterfeiting and anti-digital-theft agenda with a heavy domestic focus and international focus.

One was enhancement of customs resources and authority to take their efforts with respect to IP enforcement up the curve. The second was really a major initiative to address the growing problem of online theft and particularly focusing on rogue websites and others who are knowingly supporting and driving online traffic. Internationally, we support ACTA and really embrace increased enforcement activities, particularly...reinforcing anti-piracy regimes in India and China.

Can you talk specifically about the Internet-related aspects of this agenda?

We want to address the intermediary issue and that is where the ISP issue comes in. What we said is that ISPs really should be taking appropriate actions to reduce the tidal wave of online pirated content. But it's a discussion as to exactly what techniques and approaches an ISP uses to accomplish that goal.

The cable industry's top lobbyist in Washington isn't convinced that Google will actually follow through with its plans to provide super-speedy broadband service given its lackluster track record for building networks.

Kyle McSlarrow, head of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, also said that Google may have a tough lesson to learn when it comes to regulation.

He said Google is a "very sophisticated company" that has become a real force in Washington.

"My one disappointment is that they don't perceive to the extent that I wish they did that when you try to regulate everyone else--they just haven't learned the lesson that eventually they will come for them too," he told me today during a taping of C-SPAN's The Communicators program. "But unfortunately, that will happen."

In 2005, Google partnered with Earthlink to build a city-wide Wi-Fi network in San Francisco but pulled the plug when it proved too expensive. In 2007, Google said it would bid for valuable airwaves if the Federal Communications Commission attached open-access rules to them. Google ended up not purchasing any airwaves in that auction. The company has now said it wants to build new broadband networks at speeds of one gigabit per second--more than 100 times the speeds available to most consumers today.

"Google, the last couple of episodes, either failed to do it, in the case of San Francisco and the Earthlink experiment, or they backed away, in the case of the 700 megahertz auction," McSlarrow said on C-SPAN.

Meredith Attwell Baker was a familiar fixture in the telecommunications policy world long before she arrived at the Federal Communications Commission last year.

Now the junior Republican at the agency, she’s well-connected on Capitol Hill and understands the inner workings of bureaucratic life. She also has something the other four Commissioners rely on her for—an engineer-like knowledge of the airwaves now at the center of a high-stakes tug-of-war between wireless carriers and broadcasters.

And she hasn't waivered in her belief that controversial net neutrality rules could have adverse effects on broadband deployment.

After a few lobbying jobs, she joined the George W. Bush administration and became Acting Assistant Secretary of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an arm of the Commerce Department. In that role, she was the point-person for managing the government’s spectrum licenses and oversaw the Internet’s domain name system.

But it was the digital television transition that thrust her into the national spotlight.

Baker was in charge of a $1.5 billion program to provide coupons to consumers to use toward purchasing converter boxes, so their old analog TV sets would work when stations switched to digital programming.

The program ended up being under-funded and fears grew in Congress that there would not be enough coupons to go around. Then-President-elect Barack Obama eventually urged Congress to delay the transition by six months. (See my previous story about Baker for more details.)

That tense period, she said, made her a better policy maker. She’s now putting that experience to use.

Mignon Clyburn is the first to admit she is out of her element in Washington. The daughter of House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) learned everything she knows about politics from her father—a “blessing,” she says, as she gets used to her new job at the Federal Communications Commission.

But she has quickly found her footing as the third Democratic Commissioner at the FCC, where she is championing consumer-focused issues. On the national broadband plan, which is due to Congress in March, she is most interested in helping low-income, minority and rural communities get the computers and training they need to adopt broadband.

Her father said that is where her passion lies.

“She almost gets emotional when it comes to rural communities without broadband in it,” he said in an interview. “She’s very consumer-oriented.”

Before she was appointed to be the third Democratic FCC commissioner, she had never been away from home for more than two weeks.

But public service “is in my DNA,” she said. Her father, a former high school history teacher, has served in Congress for 18 years. Her grandparents had been active in their churches for as long as she can remember. (Read last week's profile for more details about her relationship with her father.)

She followed that heritage by single-handedly publishing a weekly newspaper in her hometown that focused on African American issues for 14 years. Her father was her business partner, but she took charge of writing stories, selling advertising, and delivering the copies to mailboxes in her 1992 GMC Jimmy, which still sits in her Charleston driveway.

Mignon Clyburn and Meredith Attwell Baker share more than the distinction of being the only women on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) . They have powerful last names familiar to Washington insiders.

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