Wheeler Says He’s Had Months to Think About Incentive Auction, IP Transition
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s blog post Tuesday laying out his larger vision on regulation was intended to lay out a pro-competitive message (CD Nov 6 p1), Wheeler said in an interview Wednesday. Wheeler spoke shortly after arriving back at the FCC from the White House where Vice President Joe Biden swore him in as chairman in a more high-profile ceremony than his Monday inauguration.
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Asked if one of his focuses as chairman would be changing the regulatory paradigm for an IP world, Wheeler cited his speech after the Biden ceremony. “I quoted Lincoln as saying ‘The struggle of today is not altogether for today, it is for the vast future also,'” Wheeler told us. “What we do today is deal with today but also help define the future and that is a pretty august and awesome opportunity.”
Wheeler said he views both the IP transition and the TV spectrum incentive auction as “two incredibly substantial” areas where the FCC has big decisions to make. “One of the things I tried to do during the six-month interregnum was to spend a lot of time thinking about how will I deal with the IP transition? How will I deal with the spectrum auction? … I can’t tell you anything specific about this decision or that decision but I do feel comfortable in the prism that I intend to look through.” Wheeler explained that prism -- the focus of his already much-discussed blog post.
"People keep coming up and saying, ‘What are going to do about this? What are you going to do about that?’ and ‘This is my favorite issue,'” Wheeler told us. “What I was trying to do was to say, ‘Look, I'd like to put this job and the responsibility of this agency into a broad perspective and I have an historical bent and so I'm going to look at it in terms of the history of networks and recognizing the fact that we're living in an historical time, in what I think is the fourth great network transformation.”
Wheeler said he will look through three prisms in making policy calls as chairman. “One is economic growth, national leadership in technology,” he said. “It used to be that the government said, ‘This is the way you will operate,’ down to the times when they inhibited covers on Yellow Pages [directories] -- talk about the ultimate micromanagement of the market.” Staying nimble is critical and “competition is by definition nimble,” he said. “It’s competition that drives the extension of networks, it’s competition that drives the quality of the throughput, it’s competition that decides the pricing, etc., etc., etc.” Wheeler noted that during his Senate confirmation hearing he assured senators he is “rabidly” pro-competition.
The second prism is “the network compact,” or “the relationship between networks, those who build them, those who operate them and those who use them,” Wheeler said. “The question is what is the nature of those values and how do those values then relate to the reality created by the new networks today.” The third prism is “what does the network do,” Wheeler said. “A network itself is pretty unexciting. It is what a network delivers, it is what a network enables, that is important.” The question is how to ensure networks “are enabled to do the things that they can,” such as high-speed connections to schools or providing access to the disabled.
Wheeler said his blog post laid out a broader vision beyond any of the dockets or decision points before the agency. “In whatever the docket, here are three pillars, three prisms that I'll look through, here are three basic concepts that I think become the way in which we deal with all the specifics,” he said. “Obviously we deal with the specifics based on the facts. … We reach fact-based decisions.”