January 2017

With President Barack Obama’s second term ending on January 20, a number of Administration officials are delivering final addresses capsulizing the advances their departments or agencies led over the last eight years. Last week, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler offered a two-part farewell highlighting the challenges we face dealing with technology-driven upheaval and cautioning policymakers not to reverse policies that ensure that broadband Internet access service is ubiquitous, competitive, affordable, open, and fair.

A supplement to the 2016 National Educational Technology Plan (NETP) which builds on the principles described in each of the NETP’s five sections—learning, teaching, leadership, assessment, and infrastructure—and examines them in the context of higher education. The supplement embraces the themes of lifelong learning, equity, and accessibility and supports the NETP’s assertion that technology must serve the needs of a diverse group of students seeking access to high-quality postsecondary learning experiences, especially those students from diverse socioeconomic and racial backgrounds, students with disabilities, first-generation students, and working learners at varying life stages – all with differing educational goals, but who all share the desire to obtain a postsecondary credential.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler says that the spectrum auction will clear the second most spectrum of any FCC auction, but that it was not the FCC's role but the marketplace's to determine that price or how much spectrum should be given up.

He was asked about the supposed demand for wireless beachfront spectrum given the demand that the auction revealed—broadcasters have been questioning that demand after the total broadcasters were willing to give up was reduced repeatedly after wireless companies declined to bid for the higher spectrum targets. Chairman Wheeler said it was Congress (in auction legislation) "that told us to create an auction that gave broadcasters an opportunity to sell their spectrum to us, and us to re-band it and turn around and sell it to wireless carriers." But it was Congress implementing an element of the National Broadband Plan offered up by the FCC and Chairman Wheeler's predecessor, Julius Genachowski. Chairman Wheeler said the FCC's job was to create the marketplace, "not so say 'this is how much spectrum has to clear, this is how much it has to generate.'" He said marketplaces "are frequently unpredictable."