Blair Levin

Who would Americans trust to best understand the broadband-related interests of the residents of a city: its mayor, or the head of the Federal Communications Commission? About twice as many Americans have a positive view of their local government than they do the federal government. Americans would be right in trusting mayors more than federal officials.

The economic reality of varied broadband deployments is that communities with the fastest speeds are most likely to benefit from competition among providers, which further pushes prices down. Thus, we soon will have a divide in which certain dense and high-income communities will have multiple choices for affordable gigabit services, while less dense, lower-income communities may still be stuck with a DSL offering that is 100 times slower but similarly priced.

We sympathize with the increased anxiety over the poor data hygiene practices of leading tech platforms. And we agree that legislation clarifying the duties of those who collect and use personal information is important, as is delineating enforcement responsibilities among agencies and jurisdictions. We’re concerned, however, by the passionate but incomplete argument that it’s time to jettison decades of antitrust policy that limits the government to intervening only when market concentration has, or could, cause higher prices for consumers.

In 2010, Google rocked the $60 billion broadband industry by announcing plans to deploy fiber-based home internet service, offering connections up to a gigabit per second — 100 times faster than average speeds at the time. Google Fiber, as the effort was named, entered the access market intending to prove the business case for ultra-high-speed internet.

[Speech] I want to talk about the secret to smart policies about smart cities.  I can summarize my idea in one word.  Learning.

The federal government is recognizing what cities and those of us here in 2013 already knew: that our policies should ensure that bandwidth never constrains economic growth or social progress. Unfortunately, one thing hasn’t changed; the federal government’s view of its own role in helping achieve that goal.  It is: 1) Make cities do all the hard work, pay all the government costs and accept all the blame for whatever happens; and 2) Let the federal government pay none of the costs, do none of the hard work, and take all the credit.

The Federal Communications Commission's Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee (BDAC) suffers from significant failures of design and execution. Due to these failures, I expect the BDAC and the FCC will adopt a framework in which industry gets all the benefits with no obligations, and municipalities will be forced to bear all the costs and receive no guaranteed benefits.

[Commentary] Criticism of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau acting director Mick Mulvaney’s recent comments to a banking group has largely focused on his advocating a pay-to-play system for interest groups to access government officials. But similarly disappointing is his wanting to close the CFPB consumer complaint database, on the grounds that he shouldn’t have “to run a Yelp for financial services sponsored by the federal government.” Mulvaney has it backward. We think governments need more, not fewer, Yelp-like services in their arsenals.

[Commentary] Communities should study and emulate the number of models of community-led broadband upgrades that clearly improve the math for investment in next-generation networks, regardless of the public or private delineation. Yet choosing an upgrade model will not be simple; communities should reflect their preferences between certain trade-offs, from control and risk to scale through aggregation or local control.

[Commentary]  As communities across the United States wait to learn how high-speed mobile networks will figure in a long-promised infrastructure plan, some cities are already attracting private investment in next-generation 5G networks. They are doing so by finding new ways to collaborate with network and equipment providers, creating a set of “best practices” that other local governments can follow. Forward-thinking officials at the federal, state and local levels are hurrying to update their processes, looking for new approaches that maximize community value and minimize delay.