FCC Chair Julius Genachowski on Broadband, Google and His iPhone

A Q&A with Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski.

He says the National Broadband Plan will require a lot of different actions to reach its goal of a hundred million homes at a hundred megabits a second. Healthy competition, Chairman Julius Genachowski says, places discipline on the market and should focus providers on providing the best service at a lower cost. Consumers are confused about their service and the price. They're confused about what speeds they're actually getting, they're confused about what they're paying for. As part of a competition strategy, increasing the transparency to consumers empowers consumers to make the market work.

He says universal service needs to be transformed to a broadband universal service fund. That's the path that will be laid out in the broadband plan, transforming it over time so that it doesn't support yesterday's communications technology but supports tomorrow's. The FCC will suggest options to do it over 10 years or faster.