Levin Says Broadband Plan Can’t Be ‘One-Shot’ Deal

Levin, 55, collapsed in the middle of a speech later that night at a dinner hosted by the Telecommunications Industry Association, which co-sponsors Supercomm with USTelecom. He was conscious when paramedics arrived at the scene. Levin “will return to work shortly,” an FCC spokesman said. He “felt ill” during his speech, and was sent to Northwestern University Hospital, the spokesman said. He left the hospital Thursday and flew home, according to an e-mail to FCC staff by Chief of Staff Edward Lazarus.

Universal broadband goals won’t be achieved with only the existing levels of private investment, universal service and the $7.2 billion in broadband stimulus money, Levin said in the afternoon. “It’s pretty clear to me that BTOP’s not going to do it, BIP isn’t going to finish the job, [and] universal service isn’t going to do the job right.” The FCC could ask Congress for “a lot of money … but there a lot of things short of that,” he said. For example, there may be ways to cut the costs of rights of way elements like pole attachments, he said.

Spectrum may be the most important asset, Levin said. “We have to look at where it’s underutilized.” There will be a “crisis” if “we don’t get more spectrum into the field,” Levin said. The iPhone has increased AT&T data traffic 5,000 percent, he said, and without more spectrum, many other carriers likely will face similar issues: “This is probably the single most important problem facing this sector.”

The sooner policymakers fix the Universal Service Fund, the better, Levin said. But he wouldn’t commit to revamps for that or intercarrier compensation as being recommendations in the plan. “I understand how government finds it difficult to deal with things until a crisis is right in front of their eyes, but this is a crisis waiting to happen,” he said. The USF high-cost fund and contribution factor is ballooning, while the revenue base is shrinking, he said.

The broadband plan should stimulate “more than just connectivity,” Levin said. That includes training sessions, among other things, he said. On how rigid the FCC’s broadband definition will be, Levin said it’s important to set goals so success can be measured. “But on the other hand, the real goal is not a numeric stat. It’s a dynamic process.”

What effect regulation has on telecom investment is a “hard question” to answer because the commission is looking “holistically” at the Internet ecosystem, Levin said. It wouldn’t be good to have “a huge investment on the network side, but no investment on the device side [and] no investment on the application side,” he said. The broadband team has been sensitive to the issue, but ultimately they're just staff providing options for the commissioners, he said.

The broadband plan will be based on what the agency knows or thinks is going to happen, but it must also accommodate the unanticipated, Levin said. One challenge is that government can’t predict “what the next Facebook will be” and what broadband attributes it will require, he said. The plan will take into account announced but unfinished deployment projects, he said. But the FCC won’t base policy on “highly speculative technologies,” he said. Getting good data is critical to determining how to get the most “bang for the buck,” Levin said. Upon arriving at the regulator, the broadband team “quickly learned” that FCC data on broadband was inadequate, he said. The plan will include recommendations to improve data collection, he said.

At the TIA dinner, Levin said industry filings to the commission have improved somewhat since he criticized their quality this summer. Filings “generally lacked anything … with regard to sufficient evidence to make any kind of decision,” and “didn’t tee up the choices that we as a country need to make.” However, “recent filings have been much better,” but “it’s still not enough,” he said. “Many of the filings in the record seem designed to convince us that the company doing the filing contributes a great deal to the economy. Well, consider me already convinced … but that does not answer the question that Congress asked?”

Many filings seemed to have an “obsession with numeric goals,” Levin said. “We will have numeric goals, but far more important are the mechanisms that generate constant progress.” Competition is a “primary mechanism, but there are other mechanisms such as transparency about key broadband attributes.” Like food inspection ratings, broadband ratings “could drive constant improvements,” he said.

Another recurring error “was thinking one size fits all,” Levin said. Some have suggested setting a goal of 100 Mbps for every home, “but we have to ask whether that’s the right thing to do,” he said. A better idea may be to ask what kind of bandwidth is appropriate for different use cases, he said. The team is investigating “the tradeoffs between having bandwidth evenly distributed” versus ensuring research institutions and major hospitals have the fastest bandwidth, “while households are provided some lower but sufficient bandwidth.” -- Adam Bender

Web 2.0 Summit Notebook …

SAN FRANCISCO -- The Justice Department’s top antitrust economist expressed hope that the Google Books settlement will be rejiggered to overcome objections from the department and many others and will win the judge’s approval. “The parties say they're working on it,” Carl Shapiro said at the Web 2.0 Summit here this week. “They're very creative, so hopefully they'll come up with something good.” U.S. District Judge Denny Chin has given Google and the plaintiff publishers and authors groups, in a class-action copyright suit against the company’s scanning of millions of books without the rights holders’ permission, until Nov. 9 to come up with a new settlement.

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The Huffington Post is guilty of “copyright theft” on “way too many occasions,” said Martin Nisenholtz, the New York Times Co.’s senior vice president of digital operations. Eric Hippeau, HuffPo’s CEO, was on a panel with Nisenholtz late Wednesday but didn’t respond. Robert Thomson, the Wall Street Journal’s managing editor, put his criticism more gently. HuffPo is “brilliant” at what it does, but “they are reverberation, not creation,” he said. Hippeau trained his fire on federal legislation to make opt-in the sharing among unaffiliated companies of user information for behavioral targeting. “If that proposal goes through, it’s a complete misunderstanding of what the Web is all about,” he said and added, “It will really hurt the ability of the marketers to do what they're good at.”

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CEO Evan Williams said Twitter has shown itself to be so valuable to businesses that he’s “not too worried about eventually extracting some of that value for ourselves.” The site is used for everything from drawing foot traffic for food trucks to selling PCs from Dell, he said in response to extensive questioning by moderator John Battelle of Federated Media Publishing about what revenue model Twitter will eventually adopt. Williams also called “interesting” the prospect of selling marketers data that Twitter holds internally about users and their communications. The information would help satisfy businesses’ desire for marketing that’s “more powerful, more efficient, more measurable” and broader in reach than current efforts online, he said. The data would be provided largely through offerings created by independent developers rather than Twitter itself, Williams said. U.S. traffic growth on Twitter.com has stalled lately, but the company has unspecified plans that will change that, he said. The highest growth recently has been in mobile and from foreign countries, Williams said. Use in Brazil has been rising fast, and recent mobile launches in India and Japan should bring many new users, he said. Visitors can get confused about how to use Twitter and the company hasn’t been good about helping them, he said. But now it’s concentrating on the problems, Williams said. The new Lists feature, allowing users to manage information about those they follow and share it with others, is a start, he said. “It’s been time for a while to rethink the suggested users list,” he said. “It’s gone on too long. I just really can’t wait to kill it” or at least make it over.