Levin: 'Pretty Good' Year for Broadband Plan

Blair Levin, former executive director of the National Broadband Plan, appears on this week's The Communicators on C-SPAN. He says that it has been a "pretty good year" for the plan.

He says it has been a case of "two steps forward, one step back," and that there are some things about which he has said "great" and others where he said "oh, really?" But he also said that is to be expected and that the plan was not meant to be a blueprint where everything has to be exactly right. Levin said that the plan was always meant to be an "agenda-setting and target-clarifying device." That means that it has targets to both shoot for and shoot at. He cited spectrum reform, Universal Service Fund reform and rights-of-way reform as among its key issues. Levin said he thought the debate had gone "off track" on the spectrum reform issue. He said the issue to resolve is not whether to reallocate spectrum, but how to reallocate it on an ongoing basis to serve evolving needs.