Catch-Up Talk with Blair Levin Yields Some Surprises

The man who was charged with crafting a plan to bring broadband to all Americans isn’t happy about the way that plan is being implemented.

Currently with the Aspen Institute, Blair Levin said, “The FCC is becoming more of a political institution and less an expert agency.” Like other DC political institutions, he said, the commission is “increasingly caught up in a one-note narrative . . . of self-praise rather than focusing on providing the expertise and analytic agility necessary to adjust programs to provide bandwidth abundance to constituencies it is meant to serve.”

It was up to the FCC to implement the ideas recommended in the National Broadband Plan – and the way Levin sees it, much of that work has been left undone. One of the most important pieces of information to emerge out of the NBP was that the majority of the homes that can’t get broadband are in areas served by the nation’s largest price cap carriers – and that hasn’t changed much. Although he noted that CenturyLink is doing some upgrades, he said “AT&T is doing zero, and Verizon sold some lines to Frontier but they’re not doing anything with what they held on to.” Levin also argued in his recent speech that the FCC essentially “punted” on “the critical issue of contribution reform.”

In other words, the FCC’s new broadband-focused Universal Service program appears to be doomed to be funded as a percentage of carriers’ long-distance voice revenues – a methodology that is becoming increasingly unsustainable as long-distance voice revenues decline.