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>> this week on "the communicators," a discussion on the future of the fcc with republican commissioner robert mcdowell. >> host: well, we're pleased to welcome back to "the communicators," robert mcdowell, fcc commissioner just reconfirmed for his second five-year term. joining us, amy schatz of the weert journal. congratulations, thank you for being here. let's start broadly, first of all, this is kind of a two-parter. what in the next six months to a year would you like to see the fcc work on, and as one of only

two republicans and one of five commissioners how much influence do you have in setting the agenda? >> guest: well, first of all, congress has mandated through the stimulus act that we present to congress a national broadband plan that's due february 17th. the date february 17th might seem familiar, that was the original date for the dtv transition earlier this year, so it seems to be an auspicious day for the fcc. so we're in the midst of soliciting public comment, data input and trying to get analysis to come up with some ideas to present to congress. so we kicked this off back in april with what we call a notice of inquiry where we sort of say to the world, please, give us your ideas and tell us what we should do. so we're in the midst of that process right now. in terms of being one of five, we all have an equal vote. the chairman sets the agenda for

the commission, that's how it's set up by statute, but certainly all of the other commissioners have a role to consult with the chairman and advise and also to vote on matters that he puts before us. so it's a small group, but actually one of least partisan places in washington. this summer i had my summer law clerks do an analysis of my votes versus other commissioners, and it ends up 89.72 percent of the time we have unanimous votes at the fcc. the other 10 percent of the time isn't necessarily a partisan divide. >> host: how would you like to see the broadband plan develop? >> guest: well, i want it to be as transparent as possible. >> host: what does that mean? >> guest: that means what the commission is thinking as well as the data and opinions we're sort of soliciting from the outside world we should make that as transparent as possible so there aren't any surprises. i'm already on record as saying i would have preferred if we

could have put a plan or an outline of a plan out for public comment. the question also remains as to whether or not all the commissioners will vote on it. it's unclear in the statute, we don't have to do it that way, i don't think, but that'll be interesting to see how that develops. >> host: have you had any discussions with the chairman about whether you will be intimately involve inside the formation of this plan? it seems like they've brought in a lot of mckenzie-type consultants to write this thing. it wasn't entirely clear to me this week after i talked to the chairman after the initial kickoff workshop about this issue about how involved are the other commissioners going to be in writing the plan? >> guest: well, i think that remains to be determined. i'm waiting with the -- meeting with the chairman later this day as well as a former chief of staff of the fcc. so we're in constant contact. i have to say thus far chairman genachowski's been very gracious

and thoughtful and has reached out a lot, so i'm going to give him high marks for his first six weeks or so in office. >> host: why do you think you should be involve inside the plan if you've got the two republicans and the other democrats being put into the plan before this thing comes out? ultimately, this is a plan, and if you're going to do anything to try to get more broadband across the country, you're going to do rulemaking after this thing comes out. >> guest: sure. first of all, it's been said this plan is the biggest thing we've worked on since the telecommunications act, so if that is the case, you would hope it would be a collaborative effort as any big initiative at the fcc. if it's merely report to congress, that's one thing. but it's not called a report, it's called a plan. it remains to be seen will this be an options memo to congress, here are 50 great ideas, or can

it be something more set in stone? i don't think it will be. what's interesting, and this is probably a bit of an oversight by congress is that the broadband mapping initiative, that data is due in 2011, so a full year after the broadband plan has to be presented to congress. so i think it has to be a flexible, iterative document. in internet time things are always changing anyway, so nothing can be carved in stone. >> host: what do you see as the role of the private sector in developing this plan? >> guest: excellent plan. this year by some estimates between 70 and 80 billion dollars in capital expenditures will be invested by the private sector in broadband infrastructure. that dwarfs, of course, the 7 plus billion dollars from the stimulus package to have public financing of broadband. and also dwarfs other countries' private investment or public investment in broadband.

so i think it's very, very important that we not discourage that. i think the first rule of any broadband plan or anything that comes out of it should be do no harm. we want to make sure we continue to have an environment that's attractive to private capital investment, and that's really the engine that's driving all of this. and tech and telecom are really well poised to help bring the country out of this recession right now. a lot of tech purchases have been put off by companies and residential users as well, and so we are really well poised to actually bring us out of this particular recession versus the earlier recession with the dot.com bubble bursting that was sort of the cause of recession or partial cause of recession. so i think it's the flip side now. so we want to make sure that whatever we do really helps stimulate more private investment as well. >> host: have you seen any indication that the plan is developing all along a line that you don't agree with? >> guest: no, not yet. i think we're still in the

data-gathering, fact-batherring -- gathering phrase, a lot of public workshops being initiated this month in washington, d.c., and i hope to be able to travel throughout the country some more to learn from folks. i was in alaska this past winter, early march, where it was 50 below with the wind chill to look at the challenges they have there with sea ice making it hard for undersea cable landings and the extreme weather conditions making it difficult for really anything other than satellite right now. not impossible, but very expensive and difficult for other technologies to help them with broadband. i want to see what other challenges we might have in unserved or underserved areas throughout the country. >> host: broadband seems to be a great litmus test to see how transparent the new fcc's going to be. a couple weeks ago you sent a letter to the chairman asking him about reform. could you talk a little about what your major points were in

that letter? >> guest: absolutely. i sent michael copps a very similar letter and sort of gave him advance copies so we could all work it out, but all in the spirit of transparency, wanted it posted on the web site in our exchange of letters and ideas. and these ideas aren't mine, and i don't care who gets the credit for them. i think many of them are excellent ideas, but the overall picture without going into all the details -- it's a very long letter -- is to make the fcc more open, transparent and collaborative both from the outside looking in, but also when you're on the inside like a commissioner being able to see the various cogs in the machinery work. we should be able to as commissioners get the same information and analyses that the chairman is getting, for instance, from our wonderful career professionals that we have working throughout the fcc. we have about 1800 or so employees there, economists, engineers, lawyers and other professionals. and many of them have great ideas and great expertise, we

need to be able to more fully use them and get them involved with these things. and here the variety, the diversity of their opinions. a great example of this was actually under acting chairman copse during the digital tv transition between january and june. that was very collaborative. we were able to make decisions in realtime, and the information flow was absolutely fabulous, and i think that should be sort of a model on how the commission works on other issues as well. >> host: would there need to be rule changes to implement some of these transparency changes that you'd like to see? >> guest: in the letter i don't really talk about rule changes so much as operational changes. i think, number one, what should start all this is a full operational, financial and ethics audit of the commission, just the way you would have if you have one company buying another or if you have new top management changes at the top of a company. so let's do a full audit. how does it work, how does it

not work, what could we do better and then revise our strategic plan as well. it's easy to get lost in the day-to-day activities and sort of forget about the direction we want to get in, so let's update our strategic plan as well. there has been talk of revising the sunshine in government act. independent agencies such as the fcc you can't have a majority of the commissioners meeting without meeting in public, without public notice and making it available to the public to see. now that the supreme court can, town councils can, congress can, they can all meet in executive session. it makes it difficult at the fcc because no more than two commissioners can meet at a time, therefore, our staffs have to shuttle around or sometimes it leads to late night meetings where we one-on-one try to relay information and gain consensus that way. it makes a certain amount of sense or made a certain amount of sense, it's a post-watergate

era law that they didn't want smoke-filled rooms producing public policy, but at the same time i think there are ways to make it transparent but also make it more collaborative as well. of course, everything we do and produce is in writing and available to the public, and i think we also need to enforce our ex parte rules a bit better. i don't think we need new rules per se, but we could enforce the ones that are on the books already. if someone from the outside is meeting with us or sends us information or new thoughts about something, we need more detailed disclosure as to what it is. if they were to meet with us and talk to us about the broadband plan, their ex parte should say something more than one sentence, well, what did you say? give us more detail. i think that would be helpful. >> host: is it fair to say -- by the way, it's at our web site, c-span.org/communicators. >> guest: and fcc.gov. >> host: is it fair to say that

your thought that the commission in the past has been dysfunctional? >> guest: well, i'm trying to look forward in a positive manner, but i think we can learn from the past, and there have been different commissions that have been run in different ways. and the commission sort of got away from information sharing on what we call the eighth floor, that's the commissioner level, and we want to get back to the days where we can get the same sort of options memo and analyses and summaries of comments that have been filed and the same legal opinions from the office of general counsel, etc. so, yes, we can learn from the past both the good and the bad. >> host: amy schatz. >> host: well, the chairman sent you a very polite letter back. i wonder what you thought of that or if you've had follow-up conversations with him or his staff on this. >> guest: we had conversations prior to the letters, and we have talked afterwards too. this has been something he's talked about since the minute he

was nominated, reform, by the president. so i think he's taking fcc reform very seriously. and he seems very energetic. he has hired some wonderfully-qualified people to come into the commission, and i remain optimistic. >> host: so last week the fcc sent letters to apple, google, and at&t about an issue about similar applications yanked off the store. did you support that inquiry, or what do you think the fcc should be looking at there? >> guest: that was issues by the bureau, i did not know about it ahead of time, so it wasn't anything we signed off on ahead of time. that, it doesn't hurt to ask questions and gather data. it does start to take the fcc in a different tack. there's been talk for quite some time about us looking into what's called hand seth exclusivity, so what that really means in the vernacular is can

you download any application onto your wireless device? you can call it a cell phone, but they've really become our personal computers. can can you have any application on there, and can you take that device from carrier to carrier? portability, we call it, can you carry it around. and i've always supported that. but also we have to ask has the marketplace been move anything that direction already? a couple years ago we had a year in our 700 megahertz auction, this was the auction of the tv airwaves reclaimed from the digital tv transition. this rule sort of mandated what we call open access. open access is something i support, but did we need the rule to do that? it ends up there are some companies already in discussions at the time of that rulemaking where they were producing devices that could contain any application that you wanted to download on them. so we have, for instance, the

google/t-mobile partnership, clearwire and other companies that are producing these things. so let's take a look at it. every decision should be data-driven, and i support that, and we'll see where the facts take us and also where the law takes us. at what point do we go from being the federal communications commission to the federal software commission? so we'll find out. >> host: it wasn't entirely clear to me what the fcc could do to apple. it wasn't -- i'm not entirely clear what the jurisdiction would be there if, in fact, they decided that apple was incorrect in taking google voice off the ap store, what rule would you use to do something to them? >> guest: that's an excellent question, and i think that'll be for a lot of lawyers to debate over a long period of time. but also there are antitrust issues here, perhaps, so we have to operate under what's called the public interest standard. department of justice and federal trade commission enforce antitrust laws, so in terms of

having an application store, as you call it, it's a little like having a grocery store. you're looking for a certain type of breakfast cereal, you're not expecting to finds, let's say, frosted flakes there. so we'll see. we'll see where this takes us. >> host: do you -- so wireless issues seem to be taking a broader, there seems to be a much broader issue with wireless issues with the hand set exclusivity, or the google voice issue, are there other issues you think the commission should be looking at in the wireless space? >> guest: well, first of all, wireless is one of the most exciting issues we cover. the amount of data you can put through the airwaves sort of like more's law with computers, we are about 2 trillion times more spectrally efficient than we were in the late 1800s, and

that trend seems to continue and will continue for quite some time, so our wireless devices will become more and more powerful every day. the average cell phone has more computing power than the entire apollo program did. not just what was going up in the space capsule, but the entire program. so it's a very exciting time. there are things over the horizon like cognitive radio that are going to make wireless technologies even more powerful. it's a pretty competitive marketplace. you have about 51 percent of american consumers have a choice of five wireless providers, and there are more entrants coming into different markets as a result of auctions we had in 2006, our advanced wireless services auctions, and our 2008 700 megahertz auctions plus we're working on the television white spaces, the unused tv channels in a particular area. so it's very, very exciting. i think it's wonderfully chaotic, and it's going to cause a lot of positive and

constructive chaos for the economy, i think, in years to come. >> host: but what about for the fcc? >> guest: well, again, i think it's important to go back to do no harm. let's make sure we do, if anything, we tread carefully here because the wireless industry has actually brought a lot of benefit to american consumers, and wireless broadband, for instance, we're the fastest-growing market in the world for wireless broadband, and that's going to continue. we're a leader there. so people have traded maybe the reliability of fiber at times for the freedom that comes with mobility. and if you look throughout the world, the world is choosing mobility, and i think that's very, very important to not only help the economy throughout the world, but also to help improve the human condition overallment. so mobile communications can help supplant things like travel. if you're in africa and you're looking for a buy we are for --

buyer for your crops, that wireless device you have can really, really help and change your life in terms of finding a buyer or medicine for your child or drinkable water. as we go forward at the fcc, i think we have to be very careful we do no harm. >> host: one of the priorities the obama administration has stated has been cybersecurity. and when it comes to wireless, there's less security than with fiber. does the fcc have a role when it comes to cybersecurity? >> guest: we may in the context of things like network management and the net neutrality debate. so the president, obviously, has made cybersecurity a big priority of his, and rightfully so. as we see more and more denial of service attacks, attacks coming from foreign countries frequently sponsored, we think, by foreign governments to shut down key web sites and servers in our country and our government's web sites, i think it's very, very important that we all sort of rally around this particular effort. the fcc per se doesn't have a

direct statutory mandate on some of these issues, but it's a partnership with other agencies throughout the government that are going to be working on this. but in that we will be working on things like net neutrality, network management. i think we need to be able to allow the network operators to insure that those systems are secure from threats, and that's going to play into the public policy that we initiate. >> host: okay, another two-parter. how do you see network management, network neutrality in the fcc agenda for the next six months to a year, and how does that fit into cybersecurity? >> guest: well, the chairman sets the agenda, so i don't know that it will, but given the amount of attention and publicity it's been given, it's sort of all related, so i imagine -- i'll just take a guess here that something's going to pop up before too long. how does it relate to security. so net neutrality, that term does not really have a dictionary definition, so it's a bit of what i call a rorschach

term. you sort of see in that term what you want to through the inkblots you can decipher for yourself. but does it mean all bits over a network are treated the same or is there room for reasonable network management? so, for instance, if there's a nondiscrimination fifth principle of the fcc in 2005 came up with four, sort of pro-consumer principles regarding network management, net neutrality to give consumers the freedom to go wherever they want on the internet is what it boils down to, and we want to preserve the internet is as open and free as possible. but there are times when network operators, your phone company, internet service providers, all have to manage the network and the traffic flow. there are surges of information, new types of soft square. if -- software. if you think of it as a torpedo-sized piece of software, can you shoot that through a straw, basically, they have to

be able to manage information flows, they have to be able to manage attacks that come from inside or outside the country. they have to be able to look for unlawful content, child pornography or stolen intellectual property also. so there are a lot of practical, everyday questions. as a consumer if you download a movie, you want to be able to see that movie smoothly, and you don't want your e-mail bits or your voice over internet protocol bits freezing up the picture or somehow interfering with your viewing experience. so there are quality of service issues there as well. so these will all play into any debate. >> host: this is c-span's communicators program. our guest is robert mcdowell, one of five commissioners on the fcc. amy schatz of the "wall street journal" is also here. >> host: since you brought up net neutrality, might as well go with it. do you think net neutrality also applies to wireless networks?

>> guest: well, again, net neutrality hasn't been defined. the commission, at least in my view, doesn't have net neutrality rules currently. but as we have wireless networks meshing with wire line networks and terrestrial and orbital networks as well, it's all flowing together. they're all connected. so it's very hard to divide one from the other. >> host: so then does the fcc then need to write new principles or actually write real rules as opposed to just having principles that sort of set these things out and actually sets a definition so everyone's not so confused in the future? expwhrg well, keep in mind every day there are many quad rls of internet communications going on, and as far as i can tell without any interruption. i think we really need to change the nature of the debait to what is anticompetitive conduct versus discriminatory conduct. so there's a lot of talk about discrimination. discrimination in many contexts, of course, is a dirty word.

to a network engineer it can mean prioritizations. a network engineer needs to be able to prioritize that video bit over, let's say, the e-mail bit so it doesn't interrupt your video experience. so is that the question then should really become is what they're doing reasonable, or is it anticompetitive? there are laws on the books already to guard against on enforce against anticompetitive conduct, and that's really, i think, where the fcc's role should be and any analysis going forward really should be focused on what is anticompetitive versus what is sort of reasonable network management. >> host: commissioner mcdowell, do you see media ownership coming back up as an issue? >> guest: it has to, actually, as a matter of law. every four years we're required by statute to take a look at our media ownership rules, and these include how many radio and tv stations a particular company can own in a market or nationally and whether or not you can have cross-ownership of broadcast property and a

newspaper, let's say, in the same market. so those will be coming up in the year 2010, and it's always an energized debate as to what we should do, and i'm looking forward to that. >> host: what are your feelings right now? do you think the rules do can need to be changed or altered? be. >> guest: i think at this point broadcasters are facing an unprecedented amount of competition and also are really feeling the effects of the recession more than other sectors of the economy. i just had broadcasters tell me yesterday some of their stations receive or received in the past tense about half of their revenue from auto dealerships. we all know how auto dealerships are doing these days, not very well. so their revenues are way down. they have their eyeballs in ad dollar, their viewers and listeners, in other words, are looking more and more to new media, and the ad dollars are following those viewers and listeners elsewhere. so it's a very stressful time for broadcasters. so i think what we need to do is

make sure we're, again, doing no harm. so i think it's a bad time to try to heap more regulations on top of them. i think broadcasters have more incentives than ever right now to differentiate their product from national or international con text you might find on the internet and to be more local. that's how they can differentiate themselves in the marketplace. we talk about localism which is definitely a goal of what we want to promote at the fcc. broadcasters get to use the airwaves for free in exchange for serving their local communities of license, that's sort of the quid pro quo set up way back when. they have more incentive than ever to serve those local communities. >> host: what do you think the fcc should focus on in the media ownership debate? >> guest: i think we need an accurate snapshot of what's the state of the industry? again, if we have a thorough fact-gathering process and honest analysis, i think the

facts will lead us to some conclusions. so i would hope that that conclusion is not to heap more regulations on broadcasters. >> host: so chairman genachowski has said fairly emphatically he doesn't think it's time to bring back the fairness doctrine, and yet there still seems to be a lot of concern across the country that it's coming back. where do you think this stands? do you trust him he's not going to bring it back? >> guest: i think we have to take him at his word. the president also earlier this year said fairness doctrine would not be coming back. there is concern, however. in december of 2007, i had great trouble with a notice of proposed rulemaking in what we called our localism docket where there are a number of tentative conclusions. these aren't ruled, just teed up to maybe produce rules at some point. one of those ideas was to require each broadcaster, each licensee to have a mandatory community advisory board.

that advisory board could have great sway over the kind of content each broadcaster airs. and also great sway over whether or not they get their license renewed. so there's some folks saying the license term should be shortened from 8 years to 3 years so each broadcaster's in perpetual renewal mode. and then couple that with mandatory advisory boards maybe dictating content, i think there's a huge constitutional problem there, but i don't think it's good public policy as well. so let's consumers decide what it is they want to listen to or see and let the market help dictate that. so that could be in the view of some a back door fairness doctrine in terms of the government controlling more and more of the content that is aired, and particularly the fairness doctrine really spoke to political speech. it was enacted in 1949 by the fcc and abolished in 1987, and