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National Broadband Plan

The FCC created this plan to try basically give broadband internet to every American in the country. With broadband internet becoming essential to the daily lives of Americans, it is important for every American to have access. In addition to becoming integrated in the lives of Americans, it also has hopes of creating new opportunities as far as more jobs and getting things done more efficiently.

The Propaganda

Consistent with this consensus view of the FCC’s role, Congress last year directed the FCC to develop America’s first National Broadband Plan, which we delivered in March. And I have described over the past months the policy initiatives I believe are of crucial importance to our global competiveness, job creation, and broad opportunity. These include:

• Extending broadband communications to all Americans, in rural and urban America and in between, by transforming the $9 billion Universal Service Fund from supporting legacy telephone service to supporting broadband communications service;

Protecting consumers and promoting healthy competition by, for example, providing greater transparency regarding the speeds, services, and prices consumers receive, and ensuring that consumers—individuals as well as small businesses—are treated honestly and fairly;

• Empowering consumers to take control of their personal information so that they can use broadband communications without unknowingly sacrificing their privacy;

Lowering the costs of investment—for example, through smart policies relating to rights-of-way—in order to accelerate and extend broadband deployment;

• Advancing the critical goals of protecting Americans against cyber-attacks, extending 911 coverage to broadband communications, and otherwise protecting the public’s safety; and

Working to preserve the freedom and openness of the Internet through high-level rules of the road to safeguard consumers’ right to connect with whomever they want; speak freely online; access the lawful products and services of their choice; and safeguard the Internet’s boundless promise as a platform for innovation and communication to improve our education and health care, and help deliver a clean energy future.

Universal Service

The Plan urges the FCC to reform and reallocate the proceeds of the FCCs Universal Service Fund ("USF") as a key funding mechanism for the Plan's ambitious broadband deployment goal, as well as to reform the intercarrier compensation ("ICC") scheme, which has been a historical source of funding for incumbent rural carriers. More specifically, the Plan recommends additional congressional appropriations for the deployment of broadband to underserved areas; creation of a Mobility Fund to ensure an even implementation of 3 G wireless coverage across the nation; and transitioning the USF to a Connect America Fund ("CAF"), which would shift up to $15.5 billion over the next decade to support broadband deployment, and would include transitioning the $4.6 billion per year legacy high-cost component of the USF to the CAF.

Merger Review

The Commission has overlapping authority with the federal antitrust agencies to review proposed mergers between telecommunications carriers. Most recent years have seen applications by wireless carriers wishing to merge, and the past year was no exception. The FCC approved, subject to conditions, two large mergers of providers of mobile wireless services during the past year:

• One between Verizon Wireless and ALLTEL and another between Sprint Nextel and Clearwire.
• With each merger that is approved, the stakes are raised for the next, for there are only four terrestrial mobile telephony providers left with national footprints: AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon.
• The FCC has a broader purview than the antitrust agencies, since the Communications Act instructs it to determine whether the merger will “serve the public interest, convenience, and necessity” without defining these terms.

Nonetheless, a large part of each merger review at the FCC is similar to that done by the DoJ, which also reviews mergers between telecommunications carriers. Markets are defined, and then the competitive impacts of the merger are assessed with a market-by-market examination of post-merger pro forma HHI levels, pro forma increases in the HHI, and the amount of spectrum (a crucial input to provide service) that the combined entity would control. We discuss these in turn. In markets where post-merger concentration or ownership of spectrum is deemed too high, the companies are required to divest the assets of one of the firms.

International Comparison

You can see here National broadband plans from around the world the comparisons between each country and where they stand.It gives you a report about each countries progress towards the broadband plan and tells you the status quo.

Controversies

One of the most controversial issues to come out of the plan is the reallocation of wireless spectrum. While the report recommends that the FCC reallocate about 20MHz of underutilized government spectrum, it also recommends that the agency get about 120MHz of spectrum from TV broadcasters. Officials who worked on developing the plan said Monday that they hope TV broadcasters will voluntarily give up a good portion of the spectrum. The plan proposes incentives to encourage TV broadcasters in the biggest markets, where new spectrum will likely be needed first, to reauction their licenses.