While selecting me as 2020’s recipient of the Savas Award could fairly be called into question, your timing of this celebration could not be more perfect. This award was established to highlight innovative efforts to, quote, “provide public services through partnerships with private organizations.” You could make a strong case that this has been the best two weeks for public-private partnerships ever. For starters, SpaceX just delivered four astronauts to the International Space Station. If a historic space flight weren’t enough, Pfizer and BioNTech just announced that their vaccine candidate has proven to be 95% effective in preventing COVID-19. 

Even though our policy agenda [at the Federal Communications Commission] has been broader and deeper and more aggressive than any FCC in recent history, it’s been animated by two objectives above all others: closing the digital divide and promoting U.S. leadership in 5G, the next generation of wireless technology.

So here’s the bottom line. One of my guiding principles as FCC Chairman has been to have faith in free markets and free minds. Time and again, that faith has been rewarded. The Internet economy in the United States is stronger than ever. We’re pushing ahead in 5G. I want to thank the Reason Foundation once again for honoring me, but honestly, the people we should all thank are America’s innovators and entrepreneurs, those who challenge the status quo and create and build.

Nov 18th, 2020 marked 3900 days since the Federal Communications Commission launched its heavily-hyped "National Broadband Plan." 400 days ago, I penned an op-ed for the Benton Institute which assessed how the FCC had been unable to achieve any of the benchmarks or meet any of the six stated goals of the plan. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that another year didn’t fix very much of the shortcomings I identified then.

Nominally, the U.S. National Broadband Plan was designed to run for 10 years. The mandates expired, unfulfilled, back in mid-March, just as the Covid-19 Pandemic was beginning. Now, eight months later, concerns over the digital divide have only grown louder, while the FCC commissioners crow about statistics on broadband deployment and hand out additional subsidies for telehealth. As 2020 has unfolded, the agency continues to tout anecdotal successes in broadband “growth” using measurements of the subsidies being handed out to connect homes left behind by the FCC’s economic centric theories of regulatory implementation.

While we can debate metrics when assessing successes and failures of the FCC’s policymaking, the events of the last eight months have put a spotlight on how important the FCC’s failure to achieve its goals has been. As millions of Americans were forced to go virtual for work and school the clear requirement for affordable universal broadband access has never been clearer.

[Christopher Terry spent 15 years as a producer in broadcast radio and six years as a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee before becoming an assistant professor of Media Law at the University of Minnesota’s Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication.]

AT&T CFO John Stephens said that adding more fiber was about more than just passing additional homes. "I think about the fiber being part of my core transport network, and serving business customers and connecting to large business customers and small business customers, and then I think of it as an opportunity to connect the homes," he said. "So I have a three-for-one in this integrated carrier environment that really gives me a different opportunity than others. When I say three-for-one, that's three revenue opportunities, as well as a really efficient cost structure. That's how we think about our fiber. That's why we continue to invest in fiber and I expect we'll do more."  CEO John Stankey said that every trench foot of fiber that the company digs needed to support various access technologies, such as cell towers, millimeter wave sites, or a strip mall that needs wireless access for businesses to run credit card approvals on. Stephens said the Covid-19 pandemic has shifted connectivity demand from cities into suburban and rural areas. With more remote workers and online learning due to Covid-19, fiber is also shouldering the shift for more capacity demand from homes instead of office environments.

In the summer of 2020, the Hamilton County (TN) public school system – which encompasses the city of Chattanooga – announced it would be providing high-speed internet access to families with students on free or reduced lunch plans through a program called EdConnect. The service is funded through the next ten years, the school board says, meaning the free high-speed internet should well outlast the pandemic. Jill Levine, Chief of Innovation and Choice at Hamilton County Schools, says there had been conversations about providing high-speed internet access to students prior to the pandemic, but the need had never been so urgent. The fact that many students did not have high-speed internet — or any internet access at all — became clear to the district when online learning began. Despite the praise the school board has received from parents, there have been challenges connecting people with the service, Levine says. Some families don’t have a fixed permanent residence where wifi can be installed. Others are outside EPB’s service area. And some students are being dropped off with a grand-parent or other family member during the day while a parent goes to work. To help get them connected, the school board also raised money for 4G wireless hotspots that can reach them where they are. And other families have been slow to opt-in to the service or are non-responsive. To help with outreach, the Hamilton County school board and EPB recruited community partners, including The Enterprise Center. Geoff Milliner, with The Enterprise Center, says that the organization put together a panel of community leaders, elected officials and religious leaders to help spread word about EdConnect.

All of us — and the media, in particular — need some clear-eyed, humble self-reflection as the dust settles on the 2020 election results. The media remains fairly clueless about the America that exists outside of the big cities, where most political writers and editors live. The media (and many Democrats) are fairly clueless about the needs, wants and trends of Hispanic voters. The polls too often sucked. The media filter bubble is getting worse, not better. Twitter is a mass-reality-distortion field for liberals and reporters. Facebook is a mass-reality-distortion field for conservatives. YouTube is a mass-reality-distortion field for people of all stripes. 

The bottom line: We are losing the war for truth. There is no bigger crisis for media, politics and society than the growing number of people who do not believe facts and verifiable figures. If we do not collectively solve this, we are all screwed.