FCC’s Broadband Outreach Can be Guided by DTV Education
The FCC should get comments for the broadband plan from those who don’t usually deal with the commission by reaching out in ways like those used for DTV education, two commissioners and four members of the committee advising the FCC on broadband told us. Commissioners’ visits to senior centers, libraries and other gatherings to spread the word about DTV before the June 12 transition and FCC work with community groups and other not-for- profits on full-power broadcasters’ analog shutoff hold lessons for developing the broadband plan due in February, they said. In seeking to get people without Internet service to increase their use of the Web, the commission is trying to reach many of the same people considered at risk in the analog cutoff, some said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
Chairman Julius Genachowski said the new-media tools being used with the FCC’s broadband workshops (CD Aug 21 p1) are meant to involve ordinary Americans and academics all over the country. A University of New Mexico professor shouldn’t have to travel to Washington to get ideas considered, Genachowski said in an interview Thursday. “We are increasing participation from multiple disciplines -- so not just lawyers, but economists and technologists and sociologists and people with history backgrounds” can be involved.
“The commission’s DTV outreach was a tremendous success and created a lot of institutional skills in explaining complex problems to the public,” said Blair Levin, executive director of the FCC Omnibus Broadband Initiative. “The OBI effort has already benefited from those skills and will continue to do so as we accelerate our efforts in the fall.”
The DTV transition showed the commission how to work with “groups on the road, how you can use a multiplicity of organizations to get the word out about what you're doing,” Commissioner Michael Copps said July 31. “There can be a lot of lessons there for broadband.” The FCC will “be in a much better position” to hold hearings outside Washington, Copps said. “We learned how powerful a tool the Internet could be” in the months before the DTV transition, with tens of millions of visits to the FCC’s dtv.gov Web site, he added.
FCC members will do outreach about broadband like they did about the DTV transition, Commissioner Robert McDowell predicted. He said the data that the commission is collecting about the availability and use of broadband tells only so much of the story. “As part of the broadband plan we have the workshops, but I hope as commissioners we will be able to go out into the real America and talk to people,” McDowell said earlier this month. “The chairman has been very supportive of all of us doing that, so I think it will happen. The more we can do to be in touch directly with the public, the better.” McDowell said he was recently a guest on a nationally syndicated radio show. “Their phones lit up,” he said. “There are a lot of people who are very interested in our issues. I liked doing that during DTV, did that a lot. I want to continue doing that if I can.”
In creating the broadband plan, the FCC probably will take “into account lessons learned” from DTV education, a commission spokesman said. He noted that Roger Goldblatt of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, who led outreach concerning DTV, is doing the same with broadband. “There definitely will be field hearings” outside Washington, and they're slated to begin in September, but the details haven’t been decided, the spokesman added.
Members of the FCC Consumer Advisory Committee’s broadband working group, many of whom advised the commission on DTV, said there are features common to education about broadband and about the transition. “Getting the word out to the same base that we identified and worked with in the DTV transition would be a really good thing to do,” said Charles Benton, the chairman of the Benton Foundation, who raised the idea with some other group members early this summer. Broadband stimulus projects are aimed at “underserved populations,” just like the FCC’s DTV education was, he added.
“We're talking about probably the same people, 80 or 85 percent of the time,” said Nixyvette Santini, who’s on the working group and the Puerto Rico Telecommunications Regulatory Board. “If that obstacle of affordability is not achieved, then this whole purpose of the initiative might be lost. Because who is going to pay if it’s too expensive?” Many people can’t afford $50 monthly for broadband, she added. Among the lessons of the analog cutoff is “the ability of the FCC to interact, exchange information and build partnerships with groups that traditionally haven’t been involved in the policy process at the commission,” said analyst Joel Kelsey of Consumers Union. To “deal with grassroots community groups that provide a lot of direct service to people they are trying to help will only help them write a better policy.”
The FCC’s experience with DTV education means “they don’t have to reinvent the wheel” for broadband outreach, said Gloria Tristani, a Democratic FCC commissioner 1997-2001 now on the advisory committee and its broadband group. “They know where to go, so that’s important.” She supports the commission’s having started a blog and Twitter feed on broadband (CD Aug 19 p14), but said those who could be most helped by a national broadband plan probably don’t have much access to high-speed service and couldn’t communicate with the FCC using those technologies. “At least have a half- dozen hearings in different areas of the country,” Tristani said. “In the short time frame that is left it would also be very good for the commission to schedule some hearings outside Washington.”