 So what the next two hours are about is language for the public interest in the wireless broadband world. Are we talking about a new design for the little black dress? Are we talking about who's wearing it? What are the theories? Larry gave us three concepts, universal service, diversity and localism. How do these get implemented in wireless and what do we take from our well-developed traditions from broadcast? And I'm just going to give, say, a few words of introduction, then we're going to go straight into panel discussion. The public interest standard has one set of meanings in broadcasting and a very different set of meanings in wireless. Some of these differences have to do with the kinds of services traditionally offered on broadcast spectrum. Some of them are historical. Some have to do with the fact that broadcast spectrum wasn't auctioned and wireless spectrum often is. And some have to do with different conceptions of scarcity and market dynamics. But as broadcast spectrum is auctioned for wireless use and as dominant platform for media becomes wireless broadband, the public interest issues uniquely raised by broadcasting are more relevant in wireless. To be a little more specific, broadcasting public interest policy has focused on issues of diversity and localism. You don't typically hear those discussed in the wireless context. You're much more likely to hear about access or universal service. Democratic values require that diverse voices be heard on a relative scarcity of airwaves and that some of this diversity should be in the form of local voices. That's what we take from broadcast policy. So the basic theory of public interest requirements was, and I'll give you three, that broadcast spectrum was scarce, broadcast licensees specially privileged with special power over public discourse and therefore should shoulder special obligations. That's one part of the theory. Two, because broadcasters own transmission infrastructure as well as content, these obligations covered both access issues, that is, who gets to own a transmitter, and content issues, what has to be transmitted. And three, the public interest attributes of broadcasting, including the fact that it was free and universally available, then spawned secondary public interest requirements in other sectors, such as non-discrimination requirements and carriage requirements for cable. So in this panel, we're asking about the relevance of all these old broadcasting theories for wireless spectrum, the potential costs and benefits of relegating these theories to broadcasting, and what new theories we might use to undergird a robust public interest conception for wireless. You have the biographies of our panelists, and I want to mention that we also have, by Skype, from the Bay Area, Joaquin Alvarado. It's audio only in the room, but you'll see him online. Joaquin is Chief Strategy Officer at the Center for Investigative Journalism. He was formerly VP for Diversity and Innovation at CPB and Innovation Chief at American Public Media. All right. So, Andy, I want to start with you, as you've been at this for a long time, advocating for the public interest. So just give us your sense of what the movement, as spectrum moves from broadcast to broadband, means for diversity and localism. Well, first of all, I'm a little bit troubled by referring to the theory of broadcast regulation in the past tense. I rarely take, as my guidance from Donald Rumsfeld, but he did talk about fighting the war with the Army that you have, and I think we need to start with the political realities. This is not to endorse anything, but to deal with the situation we have. If I could write it completely, I'd probably take all of the, leave radio alone, but I'd take all of the TV broadcasters off of the year and put them on cable and on the internet and devote all the spectrum to wireless. That's not going to happen. And Congress made clear recently that that's not going to happen. And indeed, Congress made clear that it's going to be very hard to rest a lot of spectrum from the broadcasters anytime soon. Spectrum auction plan was designed to make sure that doesn't really happen. So part of what I would say is that we need to use the existing broadcast spectrum and the existing broadcasters to continue to promote localism, competition, and diversity, universal service, as Larry referred to it, effectively and in ways that will assist educating and informing the public. So I don't want, just by starting, I don't want to give up on using broadcasting for what it can do. The lowest rated network show draws more than the highest rated cable show. The same night that Mad Men was on and drew about 2 million people, Desperate Housewives drew 12 million people. The lowest rated show on the network Sunday night outdrew the highest rated cable show. So let's not overlook the influence of that. Let's not overlook what we can do with radio, with low power FM in particular, in terms of community development, okay. That's not directly responsive to the question, but it's an important predicate. Larry was right about a whole lot in terms of what he laid out, in terms of the goals we have to have. The principles of the public interest continue to work, and as applied to how we use the spectrum, it points in a couple directions. And Larry was also right that this is very much within the box. I think we have identified things that can be done to make sure this happens. We can require that this spectrum be shared widely, that it be used opportunistically. We can provide that if spectrum is going to be licensed, even if I would prefer more unlicensed spectrum, that there be a use it or share it requirement. That is, if you've got a licensed spectrum and you're not using it or ought to be available for unlicensed use, technologically that's easy to do. And from a statutory standpoint, it's not hard to do. So there's a bunch of things we can do because the Metcalfe's law, the value of the network is proportional to the number of people on it, and we need to get more people on it. That's the diversity. If people are not getting onto the network, not being able to exercise their right to speak and to be heard, we have a less just and less complete society, just as if broadcasters do not fairly reflect the nature of their community. We are a worse off society for it. For 30 years, people have heard me talk about the importance of inclusiveness and broadcasting because the people who are in this room need to know more about the people who drive their cabs, bust their tables, care for their children, pick up their garbage than the other way around. That remains to be the case, and if we do not widely deploy these networks by lowering the barriers and cost of entry, we're all worse off for it. And that also means network neutrality. That means lowering the barriers to entry. So we've got a set of policies. You apply the spectrum that can advance the goals that are very similar to the goals that we have with broadcast regulation. So broadcast regulation and then policies to assure that everyone is connected, that there are not cost and other barriers to entry. Those basic principles can be applied to spectrum. There was never such a thing as spectrum scarcity. There isn't such a thing as spectrum scarcity. There is such a thing as broadcast policies which create scarcity. Again, I'm dealing with the army that I've got, not the army I would like to have. As long as we have government policies that create spectrum, there are going to be discontinuities and there are going to be imperfections in the market that's created thereby, and government should exercise policies to undo or address those imperfections. Thanks, Andy. Kevin, coming to you. So Andy mentioned unlicensed, and we heard a different perspective at the limitations of unlicensed from Larry. This has been sort of the cornerstone of the progressive communities push in wireless to get more unlicensed, and at the same time we saw in the auction, the TV broadcast auction legislation that there's really no good way to talk about when we know if we have enough unlicensed. There's no metric. So what are your views on that? Never enough. That's my view on a lot of things. First of all, thank you all, and thank you to the organizers. I'm a little bit embarrassed being here among such giants of the public interest and number of mentors of mine. I've spent most of my query looking at emerging technology and communications, and as Ellen said, one of the areas that I've looked at is unlicensed wireless. When you look at the question before us today, I think the fundamental problem is that we have a tradition of thinking of scarcity as the solution when in fact scarcity is the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is, as Andy said, we have policies and we also have technical architectures, and we have communities that are built around the notion that scarcity is a given, and so therefore we can take from scarcity and do things with it, whether those are business opportunities for companies that take advantage of the scarcity or wonderfully valuable and important opportunities to attach public interest obligations to the scarcity, which is traditionally what's been the case with broadcasting. And again, I think that has always been essential, and those public interest goals are even more essential. The problem is at some point if the system is about scarcity, that it makes it hard to confront the fundamental problem, which is in fact that scarcity. Scarcity is the problem. And as long as we are thinking that the matter is, let's figure out how much is enough? How much capacity do we need? There's never enough. As Larry said, the demand for wireless capacity is exploding and that's only going to continue, and we simply cannot get there without a set of policies and a set of approaches that fundamentally reorient spectrum policy around breaking down those limitations. Unlicensed absolutely has to be a significant and ultimately the major component of that, because licensed spectrum is fundamentally limited. It's fundamentally constrained by the technical architecture and by the set of economic and business relationships that it implies. But ultimately, if we think about unlicensed, and I think this is somewhat implicit in the remarks that Larry made, if we think about unlicensed as Wi-Fi, we miss the fundamental potential. Unlicensed is about architecture. It's about technical architecture, and it's also about legal and social and economic architecture, which says you do not have to ask for permission. There is not some exclusive right that's standing in the way of using capacity, and if we start to think along those lines, we realize that while Wi-Fi is extraordinary, it's just the first step. And Sasha mentioned some of the things like white spaces and low power FM and so forth that are all mesh networks that are potential here, but those are also just early steps. Ultimately we need to think about governance. We need to think about regimes and structures that allow maximal use of capacity in as many ways as possible, and until we get to that point, and all of the traditional institutions and most of the traditional political processes are arrayed against it, until we get to that point we're never going to have enough. Mark, coming to you. So we have at the FCC because of the way it's structured people who think about spectrum and unlicensed. And then we have people in the media bureau who think more traditionally and in the context of broadcasting and cable about localism, diversity. And you probably don't use universal service too much, although clearly that's what's going on, but that's a telecom concept, right? So there's different vocabulary. Can you talk a little bit just structurally at the FCC as you plow forward with broadcast ownership policy, which is the big ticket item on your agenda. How do you think about wireless? How do you work with the wireless bureau? How does it work bureaucratically as we try to knit these concepts together? I will absolutely make certain that I address if not entirely answer that question, Ellen. But let me first say thank you to Rutgers represented by you and obviously the New America Foundation and public knowledge for pulling this panel together. This is extraordinarily important work to be done, to think about, and I'll tell you why. It's always interesting to come to a panel where Larry is speaking because he always has something rememberable to sort of take out of things. I was once at a program where I listened to former FCC commissioners say that the angel of public interest never descended on him, and so he had no idea what this meant. If only he could see the public interest as the beautiful woman in a little backdressed and a classic Mustang, we would have a clear sense of the public interest. I will certainly take that from Larry's presentation. As Larry said, the public interest is classic, it is still very much with us. The notions of localism, making sure that local communities get information, are able to express themselves and communicate effectively remains extraordinarily important. The notion of diversity, again, whether it has to do with people of color or the disabled or the elderly or people who are new immigrants or Native Americans, a wide variety of Americans are represented in diversity as is the notion of different views being expressed, access to different views, different ownership, employment in those institutions that are licensed, all that's diversity, and obviously the notion of universal service. These are core principles that are on our desk. I work in the general counsel's office and so I work across the FCC, and all of these things are certainly on my plate as the so-called chief diversity officer. Let me raise something else and tell you why I think this is important. When Sasha began talking about the FCC needing better parenting, being at the FCC and seeing all the parents, whether they're the commercial providers who certainly think they are parents, represented sometimes by themselves or sometimes through members of Congress, whether it's the public interest community, which frankly we don't hear enough from, it's not too much, we don't hear enough from the public interest community, or whether it's the public at large, it is extraordinarily important for us to think about the public interest, whether it's the classic black dress and the classic Mustang or those three principles as being defined on a regular basis by the current public, not by the public that established the notions of public interest in 1932 or even going back to 27, but it is the current public that determines what the public interest is. It's not the FCC, it's not Congress, it's not the communications industry, it is the public that must determine what the public interest is. Without the public, we really don't have a good, clear definition of the public interest and the academic community certainly needs to be an important part of that. Some of the work that I do at the FCC is really helping the organization try to think more clearly about how to understand what's really happening in local communities. Toward that end, I've been working very closely with the Office of Communications and Business Opportunities in a proceeding called 257, which is due actually this year or next year, but I don't think it's going to be out for a little while. The idea is to see if we can identify market entry barriers and to propose regulations that might eliminate those market entry barriers. It is in the Telecommunications Act and that provision has been used to look, again, across the range of things that the FCC has to look at. One of the arguments that we have begun to sort of push forward is the notion that if we are looking, say, just to telecommunication services as distinct from information services or from broadcast services, that it is important for us to understand how those telecommunication services operate in the local media colleges as a whole, which means that you can't simply look at one silo. You can't simply look at wireless and not look at wireline. You can't simply look at wireless and wireline and not look at broadcasting. If you're interested in cross-ownership rules, then you have to look at newspapers as well, that you have to look at the whole community of what is going on, even if you're only interested in regulations related to telecommunication services. So we have begun through some funding of a great coalition pulled together by the folks at UC, USC, Annenberg, and involving, I think, some folks here at New America Foundation, to begin figuring out what research has been done. And again, this is not about the media ownership rules per se, but it will certainly inform what's happening in local communities. And again, the interest is obviously universal service, localism, and diversity, again, back to those core public interest goals. And I think, again, it is extraordinarily important to reemphasize, as Sasha suggested, that if the public interest is to be defined, then the parents of that public interest must be involved and engaged in that definition. We certainly hear from some of the parents. We need to make sure that we hear from all of them. Well, just to follow up on that, in terms of the constituencies that ought to be engaged in this, I mean, that seems to me to be something that's going to have to change pretty radically, that we have sort of established players representing the public interest in broadcasting proceedings. We have sort of new sets of coalitions that have mostly been focused on spectrum and telecoms issues. Do you see either the need for or the nascent emergence of kind of new entrants into this field? So constituencies that are social justice, active in the social justice world, NGOs who haven't been particularly focused on media and telecom issues who are entering this? Yes. Now, I don't know if I said this, but I'm not speaking for the FCC. I recognize that I do represent the Federal Communications Commission, but I'm not speaking for the FCC. There was a time in my life when a lot of work that I did was really trying to get civil rights organizations, writ broadly, a wide range of organizations involved in the communications to policy debate. I do not think there are enough involved. Some of this is making sure that the FCC is involved in reaching out to those organizations. But some of it, frankly, is both the academic community and the public interest community here in Washington who know these issues need to communicate better to the local public where the interests are and how folks can be actively engaged. So we certainly need folks in local communities involved in this debate. And as the prior panelists and Larry suggested, it's about all of it and the degree to which we can begin to think of it as a whole piece, as one ecology, as one set of things, as complex as that is rather than siloed. I think we'll have a clearer understanding, even of those silos themselves. But yes, we must have more people involved in this conversation. So I want to reach up to the cloud to get Joaquin. Joaquin, are you with us? I'm here. OK. Hi, Joaquin. And I want to ask you a question, Joaquin. I want to foreshadow my next question after this one is going to be about content, because we haven't talked about that. And Joaquin, as our content guy, you're going to be very relevant for that. But first, I want to ask you, Joaquin, given your former role in public broadcasting. So one of the things that we might expect to happen when the broadcast spectrum is auctioned. In broadcasting, we have a set aside for non-commercial educational TV and radio. We don't really have any equivalent of that in wireless. We can talk about whether we should and what that would look like. But one thing we might expect to happen is that public TV stations, especially those that are troubled in large markets, will participate in these auctions. And as things, I believe, as the rules currently stands, the auction legislation is written, those stations will be able to take the auction revenue that they receive and just use them if it's a university. They can use that revenue however they want. And it might mean that we have a reduction in the number of public TV stations. So my question for Joaquin is, should we care about that? I mean, should we want a policy that redirects those proceeds back into some sort of non-commercial media enterprise? Is it OK if we have a reduction of non-commercial TV stations? What should policy be in connection with non-commercial media and the auctions? I think that there's an inevitability around some of the weaker performing and economically troubled stations. They're very vulnerable right now. And if they're owned by an institution that is also experiencing major cutbacks, like an institute of higher education, it's going to be really hard to protect some of those. But I do think that there is a really critical need to be aggressive about maintaining community institutions that are focused on the question of access and public media innovation. So the role that these stations have played in their communities has obviously changed or needs to change. But I worry about them going away the same way that I worry about schools closing and libraries closing. I mean, once they're gone, do we have the capacity of society to rebuild or to start new ventures in communities that are focused on these issues? And I think the answer right now is no. So I do think that a fair amount of attention needs to be paid to what do we do post auction and how do we incentivize institutions that are cash-strapped to not just take whatever revenue they might derive from that and pour it against their debt obligations or to underwrite other activities which are also really important, like access to classes. So we don't want to have two really important public interest opportunities competing against each other because we're not being thoughtful enough or aggressive enough about reimagining and redesigning these institutions. OK, so moving on to content, I want everyone to feel free to participate in answering this question. So Joaquin, you're on the content side and you're working in investigative journalism where we've been told and the FCC has told us in a 450-page report that it's in serious trouble, right, that this is a market failure. There aren't resources for investigative journalism, especially at the local level. One of the things about broadcast policy because if you're a broadcaster, you have your own transmission capacity and you're typically doing content. One of the features of broadcast policy was that decisions about and because there was scarcity, whether artificial or manufactured, a decision about who owned the transmitter was also a decision about who had resources for content, right, because if you owned a transmitter and because there was scarcity, you pretty much had guaranteed access to a certain size audience and would presumably get revenue to make content and that's why diversity, when we talk about diversity, it's been such a confused concept but has knitted together ownership of the infrastructure with an expectation of producing content for particular communities or constituencies. Now in the wireless world, it's all unbundled, right, so we mostly have been talking about access, not so much about how to fund content. So when Larry talks about, you know, the top 20 of the top 50 or whatever YouTube channels as being directed at minority audiences, we haven't talked about where they get funding for the content, is content all cheap? Should we be concerned about content that's not cheap? Joaquin, you work in an industry where content is not cheap. So how do we think about content funding, content creation, how do we know, is that something that just takes care of itself or is that something that it should be of concern for policy? Well, I think that the evidence suggests that there are ways that nonprofit journalism can succeed if it is well-focused, well-managed, and well-communicated to the wider community what the value of it is. So while there have been really strong and important changes that have happened in the journalism space at large, that disaggregation of the economic sort of imperative or opportunity to fund it is really important for us to understand here. So I really like the notion that we have to meet people where they are. And in my new role at the Center for Investigative Reporting, we're right now experiencing tremendous growth. I mean, we're now the largest investigative news organization in the country, but we do that through a diversity of revenue streams and we are not only committed to diversity in general, but we think that that is really the next great opportunity for our content. And we are partnering also with YouTube on a new investigative channel that we see as an opportunity to reach younger and more diverse audiences. So you need to be thinking if you're a non-profit news org, especially once focused in a narrower way, like on investigative, about how to be a smart startup and operation that's agile and able to really respond to these forces. It doesn't make a good or easy case for what traditional broadcast institutions like a local television station will be able to do in the future going forward. I think that they have to move quickly into a more collaborative mode and also look for voices to come into the fray that they haven't had access to before. And just to make one final note on this, we talk about American innovation. When it comes to technology, we quote Apple and Google and Facebook, but American content creators are some of the most innovative in the world. And I think we would ignore a great strength that we have by not really encouraging them to come to this question more actively and dynamically than they have in the past. Guys, do you have? Well, it's the same problem. We have an artificial linkage. So the reason that the New York Times can afford to have the Bureau in Tehran is because Macy's takes out display ads in the Sunday paper. And the same thing with broadcasting. Those are accidents of history the way industries were structured, which had tremendous public benefits. We got investigative journalism. We got foreign news. Similarly to the way that we got public interest, diversity and localism on the back of traditional scarcity structure and broadcasting. And we have to recognize that all of those economic structures are going away. We can't bring them back. What I think that puts a spotlight on is a need to refocus on the goals. There is an inherent value, a civic value, in having investigative journalism. And when you say it, no one could be against that. Who could be against the notion that there should be investigation of issues of public concern. Similarly, who could really be against diversity and localism when you talk about those things as well as universal service in terms of what they really mean? The problem is partly all of them get mixed up in politics. And Larry of course is right about the toxicity in Washington today, but that's a reality. And the other problem is to a lesser extent, because they have been so associated with these traditional structures, the perceptions that they are creatures of them. That we have investigative journalism and we have public and non-commercial media and we have localism in broadcasting because of all of these historical industry structures and technologies that are going away. And that's backwards. But I think it puts more of the onus on everyone to make the case in a full-throated way for what the objective is, because then we can find hopefully creative ways to support them. Going back to the subject of today's discussion, I'm not sure that broadband spectrum policy has a whole lot to do with the problem you described, which is very real. I think Kevin explained it. But let me elaborate. We had an accident in history, a period of time of generation and a half or so where daily newspapers and over the year broadcasting were so profitable for whatever policy reasons, whatever governmental policy or marketplace conditions created it that they threw off so much cash that it became possible to have this public good of high quality journalism. And that model is not going to continue. And we have a massive problem which has been well documented by Steve Waldman's report at the FCC and by what Columbia put out there's no question about that, but I don't think that that calls for a change in spectrum policy. I again reiterate however that it does mean that existing over the year broadcasters should be required more strongly than ever to continue to provide that public service because if they're not gonna do it we want the spectrum back. Okay, let me, I'm gonna ask two more questions and I'm gonna turn it over for questions from you all. One is about localism. So we sort of talk about diversity and localism in one breath and localism has been a really difficult concept to define. It's been defined various ways. And I wanna ask this question in connection with something Joaquin mentioned about institutions and also Larry mentioned it, right? That one of the things Larry has seen on the ground is that there aren't institutions or the institutions that there are schools and libraries are not particularly accessible and there is no replacement of the local public or commercial station. You could also think about peg community access centers. I mean for all of their faults and weaknesses they are places in a community where people can go, they can be held accountable. The concept of localism at various times in history has been about a local person owning the means of communication. It's been about serving the local community. Sometimes that's been just about being responsive to the local community. Sometimes that's been assessed in terms of actual local content. What do we make of this concept of localism in a wireless world where kind of everything's local, right? I mean your access point is local where content has been sort of taken out of the equation because there isn't the same kind of scarcity. So what does localism mean? Well, one thing it means is broadening that access. We've done something very important by accepting the principle, if nothing more, that schools and libraries need to be access points whether we've put enough into it or whatever that's an important principle. Localism means mesh networks. It means unlicensed local technologies that allow people to connect within their communities, keep them there, not having to go elsewhere. Localism also means having low-cost access so that people within a community can connect with each other. For me, localism means the Chevy Chase ListServe. Now, I can tell you that there is a lot of very unimportant stuff that gets discussed on the Chevy Chase ListServe, but it's important to somebody. And it's amazing how important it is to somebody. If you don't have that kind of connectivity, the ability of technology to make life better for communities, to organize around the need for a stop sign at a particular intersection doesn't take place. So localism means access and localism means low-cost access and localism means developing technologies that make it easier and less expensive to have hardware that can connect. That's what localism means. Well, I think it also means engagement, right? And that can be innovated in ways that we haven't even begun to approach right now. And I think that's where the question of generating the kind of content and the kind of institutions that will promote and develop and be able to produce this engagement is around bringing new voices into the fold and I think building new kinds of equity around these networks. So where if you ask a parent what the value of public broadcasting is, they know immediately because their children watch PBS kids' content and they go and they play the games and they trust the site. That trust in loyalty can be developed in other kinds of contexts and where maybe in the adult market, it becomes more niche. I think that there is tremendous opportunity for these institutions on the ground in local communities, whether they're peg or public broadcasters, to reimagine their mission in a way that really brings more voices into the fold and establishes greater value going forward in a more wireless and high-speed environment. Yeah, like I said, there are two great opportunities for localism. One, just to build on what Andy said, is again, looking at the architecture of networks, one important way that many unlicensed wireless systems are able to avoid interference is by using low power. So the signal doesn't propagate as far and therefore you can split things up into smaller areas. That's one of the technical characteristics of Wi-Fi. That inherently leads to networks that are physically local. You can put up an antenna, in fact, you could do this in 1930 and broadcast a radio signal that's heard by every single person in the United States. Now, you of course need a clear spectrum to do that, which we haven't had for a very long time, but from a technical standpoint, broadcasting is fundamentally not local at all. It's a technology that's designed for wide area broadcast of the same thing to everyone everywhere. And again, for various accidental reasons, in many cases very good reasons, we've tethered localism, which is an important value to that non-local system. We have an opportunity with these various kinds of unlicensed systems, as well as with local governance mechanisms. And what I mean by that is opportunities to build structures like the internet, which allow things to come together in a decentralized way and share without centralized control. So one of the things that the FCC has mandated as part of the white spaces proceeding are databases to be able to tell who has licenses and who has rights to what spectrum in a local area. That's being done for very specific reasons for preventing these unlicensed white spaces devices from interfering with broadcast transmissions, but technically it has the potential to be a much broader system that works sort of like the domain name system of the internet to in a decentralized way allow lots of local actors to configure rules their own way. So there's great potential with unlicensed systems to be fundamentally structurally local in a way that broadcasting isn't. The second great opportunity is that there's an inversion. Things that used to be really, really expensive are now really, really cheap. And the problem with local content in broadcasting is you can't scale down the cost of a broadcast quality camera and a studio. It costs you just as much to build that infrastructure to serve a community of 50 people as to serve a community of 500,000 people or several million people. Works differently on the internet. Works differently with a blog. Works differently with a webcam. And as long as there is access to be able to get that content out to people and that's partly related to what Larry Irving was talking about on YouTube, there is potential that we never had for local content that has fundamentally become cheap in a way that it never was. Let me simply say that without getting into a great deal of detail about the history of any of these things, it is important to understand that localism really is a matter of the rules that are created. And it's not about what's inherent in the technology. One of the greatest challenges, whether again, whether it's broadcasting or whether it's local telephone service, wired or wireless service, one of the greatest difficulties is just making sure that when we look at new technologies, we are doing what we can to make sure that we are promoting the ability of both access and as Joaquin said, engagement. In the policies themselves and that applies to everything from satellite radio to, which can be local, but it is not, to cell phone service. So the FCC has been working on promoting more understanding of small cells and distributed antenna systems. One of the greatest problems that we have with whether it's the tablets or the mobile devices is frankly local service because you don't have enough antenna nodes or small cells in order to get that local service in the spectrum that is available. And so you have to be able to create the policies that make this happen with a focus on making sure that local communities can do this work. Again, these are rules that are created. Public broadcasting, although it was initially thought of as something that was supposed to be a national channel, or at least that's how Fred Friendly and some of the others thought of it, it was a local service. Sometimes we have local public broadcasters that actually serve local communities. Sometimes it's far too rare, but sometimes we have that. I think getting back to the initial points that we're making, one of the challenges that we have is making sure that the public, the local public, is involved in the discussion about whether or not they're getting the local service that they need, whether that's local telephone service, wireless service, or broadcasting service. So the public has to be able to speak up, public needs to be able to say, we are not getting what it is that we ought to be getting as a result of this technology and the set of rules that are in place. Thank you. All right, let's take five minutes for questions. Patrick, do you wanna give Mike people up right here in the front row? My name is Bonnie Bracey Sutton and I've been engaged in listening to Lloyd and to Larry. I work in education. We go to schools, my husband and I, where there's a big sign across the door, no cell phones. You can't bring your own device. The teachers don't know how to use the devices. And yesterday I went to a meeting, the White House had the idea, but the lobbyists in education are saying, we need our own pool of money. How do we get you guys to talk to them so they know what's possible and so they know what the future is? I think that's for you, Mark. Ah. I mean, one of the things that is so frustrating and challenging at the FCC, I'm probably one of the few people that actually looks at both the old FCC website and the new FCC website, which I think gives lots of people problems. But we've got, FCC's got blogs and Twitter and we put out this stuff on a regular basis. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to sort through. I think we would acknowledge that. We need to do a better job of communicating effectively with the public. But, and although we do a good deal of outreach here and there and in some places, I would suggest that there are some budgetary restrictions that we're facing about the degree to which we can be more effective in outreach. Which is again, one of the reasons why it's very important for local communities to be engaged in this conversation. And with regard to our outreach, it is important for us to hear that you are not hearing from us about things that are important to you or that you can't understand some of the language that's in the blogs or in the different proceedings that are coming out. One of the greatest, I think, FCC chairman of all time was Newt Minow. And one of the things that Newt Minow did, which the broadcasters were not happy about, was that he went on radio shows and talked to newspaper editorials across the country on a regular basis about what was going on in broadcasting and the importance of the public to be engaged in telling the FCC what they were facing. The fact of the matter is the chairman of the FCC has, I think, been in front of one member of Congress or another before he's rarely a month or two goes by before he is not in several meetings on the Hill. Perhaps we should do a better job of getting out to the public, yeah. I just have to say as a teacher, and I bet Kevin feels the same way in higher education, one thing that scares is attention, right? And we haven't figured out how to keep the attention of our students while opening up technology and using it smartly. And that suggests, and of course, in the broadband adoption debate, there's lots of discussion about the fact that it seems sort of unbelievable to many of us, but of course it's a real fact that people don't know how to use technology and they may not see the value in it and it points towards media and digital literacy for everybody, you know, from teachers to consumers. Yes. And then. My name's Lee Yang, thanks for panelists for this topic, but I think we have to have a vision how to compete with our opponents against the public interest. As you can see, the government agency, FCC, or the Department of Justice, they promote somebody up there when they are not really so public interest. So what we want to say is we, not on a localism, but I think the local and global issue are interrelated. And when they keep promoting themselves, they go to higher places, and that's why you go to the war with all those budget deficit, with all those soldiers being killed while not serving our public interest. So what I want to say is we have to stop those people who promote the bed agenda first. So we have to have some kind of facilities, airway to promote our own people who can serve the public interest while deter those for bed legislation proposal or budget proposal. So what I try to say is there any mechanism for this moment almost any agency are not really so public interest, generally at least. So how do we promote that? How are we going to have agencies really possess all the people's voices, their complaints, and they can voice, they can point out specific government officials who are promoting bed agenda to serve their interest. You were saying a fundamental question about the dysfunction in our democracy and I don't know if, I don't know if, Andy, do you want to? Well, let me, yeah, this is a fundamental question that transcends what we're talking about here. I spent 34 years at Media Access Project and I would frequently say that you can't do something that long if you're not an optimist and I am an optimist. On notwithstanding the dysfunction that you describe, I think that the makings of a remaking of our decision-making structures are falling into place. I think social media, I think the kind of widespread deployment that we've been talking about here provide the seeds for breaking down some of the barriers that you talk about and ultimately I think technology nudged in the right direction is gonna make for a more democratic society. Jim? Yeah, the subtitle of today's event is New Theories of the Public Interest. The subtitle of today's event is New Theories of the Public Interest in Wireless. And my basic question is, how do you define new? You know, go to an academic conference on history and you know, it could be several decades. The recent, and maybe the definition of new here is since the beginning of the broadband era in the late 90s. I mean, I've been to hundreds of conferences over the last few decades on themes like this and with all due respect to the very distinguished panel, I don't think I've heard any idea that I haven't heard dozens or hundreds of times. Well, stay tuned for panel two. Right, okay. So my question for you also, besides how you're defining it, is you're one of the great curators of these ideas on the public interest. What do you find new in refreshing on what you've heard here or expecting maybe to hear? This is the thing that you do. Okay, well, I'm just gonna give you one answer to that and I was, maybe we'll cover this again in closing after we've heard panel two. But I actually heard something very profound from this panel today, which to me is very exciting, which is that our old theories of the public interest, diversity, localism, universal service, we actually have, we could never really implement them very well with broadcasting, because it wasn't really the right architecture. Sort of gerrymandered, right, to be local when it's not local, to serve diverse interests when it really can't because it's pretty limited and that we now have the opportunity to effectuate those goals in an architecture that's suitable using technology that's suitable to those goals. And what I think is interesting is that you don't, the challenge is to import those concepts into wireless. They haven't been imported. I mean, you talk about net neutrality. We talk about access. We talk about unlicensed. That's what you hear from the public interest community in wireless. You don't really hear the terms localism, diversity. They're considered sort of fusty broadcast phrases. I think what we're hearing from this panel is that those actually have life in the wireless. In fact, they may have more life in wireless than they ever had in broadcasting. So let's take a five minute break now and we'll come back for panel two. Thank you. Thank you.