As chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Reed Hundt is guided by two principles: first, that the FCC should write fair rules of competition for the communications sector and second, that the FCC should ensure that the public benefits from revolutionary changes in communication. In his two-plus years as chairman, he has been recognized for his leadership on issues ranging from spectrum auctions, to children's education and programming, to access for people with disabilities.
Hundt advocates articulating clear and concrete rules for the communications sector, and has actively promoted competition among all five lanes of the information superhighway that the FCC regulates: broadcast, cable, satellite, wire, telephony and wireless communications.
He is strongly committed to the vision of the President and Vice President to network every classroom and library in the United States by the year 2000. He has established an Education Task Force to coordinate the FCC's role in implementing the education provisions of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Before becoming chairman of the FCC, Hundt was a partner in the Washington office of Latham & Watkins.
We began our interview by asking him what he'd done before he became a lawyer . . .
Reed Hundt: It was a long time ago, but I had a respectable job back then. I was a school teacher. It was a very difficult job, just as it is today. You've got to be creative, because you soon recognize that the bureaucracy's curriculum leaves you short of being able to actually reach the kids. So you look for all the tools you can find. But when I was teaching school, those tools were essentially non-existent. We really didn't even have books. There was no functional library in the school. It was a junior high school of more than a thousand kids. Fewer than half that entered seventh grade would graduate from ninth grade.
Educom Review: This was where and when?
Hundt: It was 1969 through l970 - in a downtown urban school in Philadelphia. There was a lot of violence and a lot of crime and a lot of family problems, and fundamentally the school itself was like a fortress in which you felt that you were trapped, with no way out. One time we got a bus and took the kids downtown, and that was our only experience with the outside world for the whole year. Think what it would be like in a school if it had 21st Century classrooms! Think of what it would mean to those kids to be able to walk into a classroom or a media lab and ride the information highway, take a look at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, or just enjoy some software that they pull down from the Internet! That may seem sort of fanciful, because we've become accustomed in this country to believe that some kids will just have to learn in the school of hard knocks - and "what the heck, maybe they'll make it." To an entirely intolerable degree, we've become inured to the inequality of education. We really have to fight against that. We have the power to change. Now we just need the will to change.
ER: Is there anything the FCC can do to improve the schools?
Hundt: Well, it's not within the FCC's power to change income levels in whole neighborhoods but we have been able to find the money to help rebuild the schools. On July 11th the President announced that FCC engineers have discovered how to make available for auction channels that are called the "sixties." In most cities there isn't anyone using TV channels 61, 62, 63, and so forth. And our engineers have figured out how, with new digital technology, those channels can be given up to auction for other kinds of uses. The President said that we ought to go ahead and do that, and raise approximately five to 20 billion dollars. And he would devote, I think, five billion to rebuilding those schools; and in the rebuilding we would put modern communications networks right inside of them. All I can say is: this is what change is all about. Here you have real vision at the highest level in this country, and it's a vision that will totally transform those schools.
ER: Talk a little bit about the different roles of government and private industry. What differentiates what government should do from what private industry should do?
Hundt: Let's just look at the President's idea. Billions of dollars recovered by auctioning those channels could be placed in the hands of the school districts, which could have a competition among communications firms, network providers, building contractors, and so forth. These kinds of firms could come in and say: "We can build in your schools the same infrastructures we build for a new software company's headquarters in Silicon Valley or the communications center for a Fortune 500 company." So the private sector would be on the competition/sell side of the equation and - thanks to the President's idea - the schools would at last have the dollars necessary to be on the buying side. And what they would be buying would be a part of the future for the children of America.
ER: Do you believe the notion of "universal service" should apply to the new technology? And, if so, how?
Hundt: I think what we are talking about here is improving the quality of education and at the same time promoting the equality of education. Universal service is about equality of opportunity: giving students an equal opportunity to get on the information highway, an equal opportunity to talk to one another, an equal opportunity to learn. I think the idea of universal service, long confined to the familiar residential telephone, is an idea with much greater power than just rudimentary communication.
ER: But how much greater power? How would you define universal service in the new age? How far would it go?
Hundt: There are several steps we need to take, but without assuming that there are limits. The first step is to have a connection in every classroom. The classroom is where learning takes place. Our next step is to make sure that the teachers and the parents and the schools themselves are the ones defining what the service needs are. I wouldn't want to have the Federal Communications Commission do anything more than create the opportunities. I certainly wouldn't want us to tell people in classrooms what it is they specifically ought to have. They ought to have the opportunities put in front of them, and they can tell us what they need.
So, for example, that junior high school I talked to you about might say: "What we really need is for every one of our classrooms to have a video conference connection to all the other schools in our state, because we don't have an advanced science teacher and we need to be able to share the resources of a school with a star physics teacher." Some other school might say: "Our problem is not lack of faculty, it's lack of books. Our library is utterly deficient, with no books published in the last 10 years. We need to compensate for that by having every single classroom have a half dozen computers with Internet access so we can pull down the literature of the world over the Net." It is important that the problems be identified by the people actually in the schools, so that these problems can then be solved by the many communications wonders that are now being delivered down the information highway.
What I am describing is exactly the way things work in the business world. The business world doesn't say, "Gee, give us whatever you've got." Instead there are technology information officers who say, "Here's what our business needs are. Now tell us what is the cheapest and best way to meet them." It is going to come to pass that schools will need to have their own information technology experts, and that should be something we all welcome, because what is a school if it is not a place where information transmission is the real core mission?
ER: Speaking of mission, tell us in the broadest terms what the mission of the FCC is. And then how it has changed.
Hundt: Two missions. The letters FCC should mean both "For Competition in Communication" and "Friendly to Children and Communities." Those are our two missions. We are committed to promoting competition in all sectors of the communications community so that in the near future communications services will be like soap or shoes or seltzer or software. You will simply choose from among competing products and services in which you see innovation and creativity and excitement, for which you will pay prices that set strictly by demand. Services will be worth the value they deliver. We don't have a hyper-regulatory, huge bureaucratic monopoly approach to the communications sector.
ER: Then the mission appears to have changed in very recent years, is that correct?
Hundt: You are absolutely right. We have a totally new mission. And it was the goal of President Clinton and Vice President Gore to give us the new mission I've just described, and they achieved that in the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that reverses the bureaucratic monopoly of "one size fits all" approach of the past. The second part of our mission - Friendly to Children and Communities - is a way of saying that we need to make sure that the benefits of the communications revolution are available to every American. The reason the President gave me this job, and my specific mission here, was to make sure that the FCC became an agency that really had a vision of trying to help all Americans. Historically, this agency had been interacting primarily with a hundred lobbyists on K Street here in Washington, and our well-worn linoleum-lined halls normally resonate to the squeak of their Guccis as they slide smoothly from office to office. But what we really need to do is to be wide open to the whole world. That's why in the last two years we've gotten on the Internet, where we get 50,000 visits a week. The FCC needs to develop and maintain a vision of how the communications revolution is supposed to help everybody in this country, not just the privileged.
ER: We talked a moment ago about bureaucracy. Let's talk for a moment now about politics. You are not an entirely uncontroversial figure.
Hundt: Really? Are you sure? Gee, this is quite a surprise to me.
ER: We probably were talking to the wrong people. In any event, give us, if you will, an explanation of what's in your critics' heads.
Hundt: Well, the last two years in the communications revolution have all been about change - in both the business sector and in the technology laboratories - and they are and ought to be about change in policy as well. A good watchword for the last several years has been "against the grain." We have said: "Let's move in new directions. Let's have the will to change." And so, whereas TV licenses and radio licenses used to be given out to the people with the best lobbyists, we decided that there should be a better way to distribute licenses.
In 1993, when Congress passed President Clinton's budget law, we received the ability to have auctions, so that instead of giving out licenses to those people who had the best lawyers, we just put them on the auction block, because spectrum is the public property of America and the American people ought to get something back for it. Well, as you know, the auctions have been an enormous success, but of course they have also made unhappy everybody who thought they could get those licenses for free. And those people had some very powerful special interests advocates here in Washington. In fact, they ring our building with their own offices, like some sort of semi-friendly army that's either guarding us or trapping us. And this isn't the Beltway I'm talking about. This is sort of a noose-around policy at the FCC.
It's a hard thing to break those bonds and to open ourselves up to the possibility for change so that we can be responsive to the needs of all Americans. Things like the V-chip or the fight for educational TV have sparked intense opposition among TV networks, which are very powerful. One Senator told me the networks are the most formidable adversary he had ever faced in his career - and this is somebody who served in active duty in the military and received many honors and medals. Now I'm not saying that the business community in general is the enemy of change. I'm only saying that those people who are vested in the status quo find change to be very, very difficult. I'm sure we have lots of advocates of change in the business community as well.
ER: The subject of TV inevitably prompts us to ask you to recall the famous phrase of a former FCC Chairman who characterized television as a "vast wasteland." What do you think of television as you find it now?
Hundt: Well, Newton Minow in the '60s was concerned about a "vast wasteland," but my main concern today is that we not - pardon the wordplay - waste the vastland of TV's great potential - particularly the new invention of digital television that gives us the chance to have as many as 70 to 150 new channels for free over-the-air in every major city in the United States. And this is on the very verge of being rolled out. But I don't think that any more than 95 percent of the thousands of new hours of digital TV should be devoted to commercial purposes. Five percent ought to be devoted to public-interest purposes, so that, for example, we could have free time for candidates and completely transform the way that campaigns work in this country; and we could have enough time available for a whole free over-the-air educational TV channel digitally in every city in the country.
ER: There are some, of course, who say that diversity will take care of itself with increasing bandwidth and increasing channels. You don't believe that?
Hundt: A lot of people, including some of my colleagues here, say, "You want educational TV? Then go ahead and subscribe to cable and watch Nickelodeon." There's nothing wrong with cable TV - they've shown tremendous leadership in delivering diverse programming; but what I'm talking about is a free, universally available public good called broadcast television, and it goes back to what I was saying before. We should be talking about delivering public benefits to everyone, and we can do that in this country. We are rich enough to do it. We have the creativity to do it. I just don't buy the idea that if you want a quality education you have to go to private school - or just forget about it; nor do I buy the idea that if you want educational TV you ought to have to pay for cable - or just forget about it. So I'll say it again: We should be talking about delivering public benefits to everyone in this great nation of ours. Everyone.
SIDEBAR
Reinvigorating Education
Not long ago, I had the privilege of speaking at the celebration of the Library of Congress's project to digitalize its collection. As leaders of Congress and the private sector gathered in the beautifully renovated great hall of the Library, what struck me most is the potential for technology to reinvigorate and restore. After all, here we were in one of our great institutions marveling at the prospect of bringing some of our most historic, significant documents to all Americans.
As we enter the Information Age, we often have a tendency to focus on the future and the futuristic. Terms such as ISDN, compressed digital, the Internet and Local Multipoint Satellite Distribution Systems convey a sense of the new and the unknown. We are dazzled by images of technology that only a few years ago were the stuff of science fiction movies.
But the real power of technology and communications is the power to build upon and expand the strengths of our institutions. The ability to communicate and disseminate information enables us to take what is best and share it widely and effectively.
Nowhere is this more true than for our institutions of learning. Colleges and universities have been dominant shapers of community, culture and politics as well as education. They created visions for progress and led the implementation of those visions.
The higher education community must now be a leader in the shaping of the Information Age. I know of no more influential way to improve education for all Americans and to restore community than to bring the best minds of our country to the task.
I have seen the wonder in the eyes of young children in a poor school as they have the chance to listen to and watch the best, most engaging professor impart his knowledge over a distance learning system. And I have seen the spark of creativity and true learning as those students have worked to pose questions to the professor through interactive technology.
That, however, is just the small image that must drive our efforts. Our vision must be big and bold. We must work together to find ways to link our universities, libraries, and primary and secondary schools in order to maximize learning. We must develop the most effective curriculum for use in conjunction with the new technologies. We must bring the works of our libraries to all Americans.
Much already is underway to define bold visions. Virginia Tech is undertaking an ambitious program to create a wired community that links its resources to the whole town of Blacksburg. The Chicago 21st Century Community Learning Centers Project is connecting high schools, elementary schools, colleges and community groups to serve students of all ages in that city's empowerment zones. San Diego State University has partnered with Clear View Elementary School to bring computer-assisted learning to a school where English is a second or new language for 68 percent of the school's students.
Fortunately, Congress has given us a strong mandate and mechanism to assist you in the mission. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 calls upon the Federal Communications Commission to develop and implement rules that will ensure that all libraries and primary and secondary schools have access to telecommunications services. For the first time, the law guarantees that all teachers and children in every classroom have a right to access advanced technology.
By November 8th of this year, a Joint Federal-State Board must issue its recommendations to the Commission on implementation of universal service, and the Commission must take final action by May of next year. So one of the key tools should be in place in the near future.
The Commission is committed to getting the universal service system right. We want to ensure that it facilitates learning and that it enables effective links between all institutions of learning as well as libraries. We must work to guarantee that the system energizes and complements the training of teachers and the development of curriculum.
To make sure that we get it right, we have encouraged comments in our rulemaking from educators as well as telecommunications providers. We are heartened that we have received input from members of the higher education community as well as the library and elementary and secondary school communities. We need even more advice, support and assistance.
I bring a certain zeal to this effort. As a government leader, I believe that we have the best opportunity in many years to reinvigorate education. But my commitment also has a personal dimension. I was teacher before I became a lawyer. My mother was a teacher, my brother and his wife are teachers, my sister is a librarian.
I know from experience that education matters. I know that the higher education community shares that commitment and will continue to offer leadership and bold vision.
- Reed Hundt