There Oughta Be a [New] Law

I want to close by reflecting on what we heard, because the arc of [this week] tells a story. We began with Senator Markey reminding us that universal service was never a narrow technical objective. It was, and remains, a moral and democratic claim. Access to education, economic opportunity, civic participation must be available to everyone, regardless of geography, income, age, or background. That is what we are really talking about when we talk about universal connectivity. The means of participation. The connective tissue of society. We should not think of connectivity as a gift, or charity, or even a subsidy. The internet was built on public investment, on DARPA research, on NSF grants, on spectrum licensed from the public airwaves, on rights-of-way granted across public land. I think of universal connectivity as one way to ensure that the value created with public resources and on public infrastructure accrues to the public. Then we heard the story of the law itself. It is worth pausing to appreciate how extraordinary that is. They passed a law. A wildly bipartisan law. A law that looked to the future, and did not lose sight of the public interest. Not because everyone agreed on everything, but because there was a shared recognition that communications infrastructure was too important to be left to chance. If there is a lesson for us now, it is not nostalgia; it is possibility. This was a bipartisan issue and should be one today. And then we turned to implementation, where we were reminded that the devil is always in the details. Finally, we asked a forward-looking question: Do the conditions of today mirror those of the mid-1990s, making new reforms possible? What regulatory tools do we have to address the challenges of this new communications environment?