Remarks by 
Michael K. Powell
Chairman
Federal Communications Commission
Keynote Address
at
SUPERCOMM 2001
Atlanta, GA
June 6, 2001


	Thank you, Matt, for that kind introduction, and it's really a pleasure to be here 
and to have an opportunity to see innovations firsthand.

	You know, over the weekend, I had the rare opportunity to actually get a chance 
to catch up on my reading, and I read a few newspapers, business magazines, and the 
like, and it seemed that in every publication I read there was a gloom-and-doom story 
about the state of the telecommunications industry and the market.  Failed companies, 
failed policies, failed promises, and disheartened consumers littered the headlines.  The 
tone of the stories: dark, desperate, hopeless.  

	In the body of these pieces there were very few on record espousing a more 
hopeful picture.  How dramatic a turn from just a year ago when this same chatty class 
competed to be the first to trumpet the new, new thing.  It is now distinctly chic to be a 
doomsayer.
	
	Now, I pondered this mortuary atmosphere and wondered, are the naysayers 
correct?  Is the information revolution a popped bubble of hot air?  Should we chalk it up 
as being too hard, too unrealistic, too complicated?  Should we fold our cards, have a 
drink to our shattered dreams, and laugh at our gullibility?

	I sat there trying to imagine the great telecom revolution flatlined, but it just 
wouldn't rest in peace.  Something is very much still alive, something profound and 
unrelenting, something that will not be blown aside by the dark-clouded blustering of 
pundits or the disenchantment among some policy-makers or the bowed heads of 
defeated businesses.
	
	I want to stand up here today in defense of optimism.  The fundamentals of the 
information revolution are very much still alive and will drive us forward despite 
ourselves.  Technological advances will continue to dazzle us.  Consumers will demand 
the tools that they need for their lives and their children's lives, just as businesses will 
demand the tools of greater productivity.  Determined innovators and entrepreneurs will 
find a way to profitably service this demand.  The current downturn is, indeed, painful, 
but it cannot and will not deter the march forward toward change and a future defined by 
infinite, ubiquitous information in the hands of consumers.
	
	We often talk about the Information Age in the language of revolutions.  I looked 
it up, and a revolution is defined as a sudden and dramatic change.  But this world was 
never going to change overnight, not in the least.  I think it is better to conceptualize the 
period that we're in as a great migration.  A migration is defined as "a movement from 
one place to another with a goal of making permanent settlement in that new location." 
A migration leads to diffusion of culture, tools, habits, ideas, and forms of organization.  
But as has always been the case, migrations take time.

	A migration is an apt analogy, for we are on a journey.  We are pushed from the 
legacy systems and services that we've known for a century and pulled toward a world 
marked by dramatic technological advances, more efficient and dynamic infrastructures, 
and a wider range of goods and services that stem from computer power being married to 
communications technology, and all of it being pushed into the hands of individual users 
on the periphery of the network.  But as is so often the case when a people strike out for 
the promised land, we underappreciated and underestimated the challenges of the 
journey.
  
	Like the throngs standing around the back of a wagon listening to the prospector 
preach the benefits of the gold rush, we quickly jumped on that band-wagon, wanting to 
believe the new technology and the new economy would provide a quick path to riches.  
And in this techno-frenzy we accepted that somehow technology had eliminated business 
fundamentals.  

	Too many companies commanded their new competitive artillery not with the 
words "ready, aim, fire," but seemingly "ready, fire, aim."  Columnists celebrated the new 
technology that had ended business cycles, insulating somehow the market from 
economic downturns.  Investors shelved the strategies learned over centuries as if history 
really would never again repeat itself, and government policy, too, excited by the 
promise, pushed hard to hastily invent markets without regard to the conditions necessary 
to nurture efficient and long-term competitors.

	But it’s always true that massive migrations and explorations rarely are smooth 
and uneventful.  Cold winter storms do descend on travelers.  Seemingly impassable 
mountain ranges do rise up to block one path from another.  Settlers and explorers are 
eaten by animals and robbed by highwaymen, and I'll leave to your imagination which 
one is which.
		
	Without question, we are feeling the penetrating cold, and experiencing the 
exhausting frustration, of the first leg of this journey.  The funding crisis is senselessly 
starving even the heartiest and most worthy of companies.  A passable business route to 
profitability looks unreachable to so many, and consumers are losing hope, hassled by the 
frustrations and confusion of new services, and embittered by the overinflated promises 
of the prophets.
	
	But I want to submit, there is a case for optimism.  No matter what we say, the 
journey will go on, no matter how hard the current conditions, for there is no real going 
back.  The laws of physics and the technical advances that ushered in this era will not 
cease their unrelenting march.  They are unmoved by our hand wringing and will 
continue to transform science fiction into reality for the masses.  Costs will continue to be 
driven down, and powerful possibilities will continue to go up.  This is unstoppable, and I 
assure you, someone will harness its promise.

	The advanced architectures that have been emerging are unquestionably superior 
to the communications systems of our past.  Packet-switched architecture, broadband, and 
the digital use of the air and skies to deliver services will not abate and will be the 
underpinnings of our future communications systems.  Moreover, consumers, though 
wary, continue to demand the tools of the digital future.  We remind ourselves that the 
power of technology is the empowerment of people.  They will value the possibilities and 
continually search for valued applications at reasonable prices.  Someone will provide 
them.
	
	Opportunity thus remains.  Nimble, fleet-footed entrepreneurs will harness this 
chance and find a path to success.  It is the wise investor, I submit, that will see through 
the storm clouds, find these companies, and aid in their trek to the digital, broadband 
world.

	My optimism and conviction that the revolution will continue guides how I've 
chosen to lead the Federal Communications Commission.  We know that there is no 
turning back and that the agency will have to change and prepare itself for the migration 
to the digital, broadband environment.
 
	Let me just share with you the cornerstones of our program, and I would like to 
begin with my view of competition policy.  First, competition policy traditionally focuses 
on prices and discipline and market power.  Yet it's perhaps more important today than 
ever to focus competition policy on the right regulatory framework for fostering 
innovation, and perhaps more importantly, to promote competition policy that encourages 
investment in advanced infrastructure and fosters and encourages experimentation with 
new communications systems like Internet telephony.

	I'd submit that the communications space is filled with competitive innovation, all 
of which we need to promote: DSL; cable-modem service; fiber reaching deeper in the 
network and eventually the home; wireless, fixed, and mobile services, including Internet 
functionalities, satellite services, and perhaps even the electrical grid.  They are all vying 
for research-and-development dollars.  Innovation, investment and deployment of 
advanced architectures to deliver these services, in the minds of the FCC, have their 
place, and we are looking for ways to encourage the continued development 
of all of them.

	I want to make this point plain: a commitment to markets at a time of 
experimentation is not a bow to big business. The market is not just a place where 
companies make money.  It is also the chat room where producers and consumers engage 
in a great dialogue, negotiating to determine what services are valued and at what price.  
We need to continue to make sure that that chat room is alive and well.

	The second plank of our competition policy is to be guided by the view that we 
will let the market pick winners and losers and hopefully not government policy.  It is my 
view that government is at its worst when it attempts to pick competitive winners or 
losers, or worse, when it tries to pick a technology.  It has the cloudiest crystal ball of all, 
and industrial policy is very dangerous in periods marked by experimentation.  We must 
resist the temptation that is so often presented to us, sometimes by competitors, to shape 
evolving markets in some image that we preordain.

	Third, the government must remain vigilant as well, to anticompetitive dangers in 
the marketplace.  We must keep our eye on the rapid developments that could lead to 
unbridled market power that would harm consumers.  Yet we must be clear and demand 
clear, demonstrable evidence of anticompetitive effects, and insist on seeing the 
emergence of persistent and dangerous trends, before intervening in the marketplace, so 
as not to distort efficient market development, and more importantly so as not to be used 
by companies attempting to gain competitive advantage because they lost out on some 
innovation.
	
	Fourth, when the FCC, a state agency, and Congress do act, however, and 
promulgate rules and policies designed to govern actions and behavior, the Commission 
must swiftly enforce such rules and adequately punish willful disregard of their 
requirements.  That's one of the reasons that one of the first things I did was to ask 
Congress for a dramatic increase in the fines and penalties to put teeth and meaning in 
our enforcement efforts.

	And finally, the fifth component of a healthy competitive policy is understanding 
and respecting the need for regulatory stability and rationalization of the regulatory 
structure.  You know, it's interesting, in the FCC's history of 70 years of regulation, we 
never had to worry about the interaction between regulatory policy and investment.  
When you had a regulated monopoly, they just swashed money from one bucket to the 
other.  We didn't have to be cognizant of how our decisions would affect the marketplace.

	But we increasingly recognize that uncertainty introduces risk.  Our failure to act 
puts a cloud over a marketplace that can limit the ability to take advantage of business 
opportunities.  So more and more we need to be guided by the important value of limiting 
that uncertainty.  Right or wrong, whatever your perspective, we will make decisions, and 
we will try to make them very quickly to stabilize markets.  I operate on the credo that 
indecision and inaction is not a legitimate government policy.

	Similarly, we have to act quickly to rationalize regulations.  The regulatory 
environment has been built over a century on clearly defined, technological buckets.  
Depending on the nature of the service you use, you will trigger a certain component in 
the statute; you will be regulated in a certain way.  We increasingly see the distortions 
that can result in the marketplace by regulatory arbitrage as a consequence of the 
differences across these buckets.  We have a duty to work hard to harmonize that 
regulatory environment so that one technology or one industry segment isn't unduly 
favored or burdened in a converged environment.

	But competition policy alone isn't enough to make the FCC a meaningful 
institution during the migration.  We have to turn inward as well, to our management and 
operations, to make sure that the agency is an efficient and effective and responsive 
organization.
  
	I'm guided by a few simple principles, the first:  We make the hard decisions first.  
I learned in the Army, as we used to say, "bad wine doesn't get better with age," and 
putting off the difficult decisions only delays the opportunity to make a difference.  Not 
only will we make the hard decisions first; we are going to make them clearly.  I have 
seen all too often the dangers of double-speak regulation, undue compromise, middling 
language that only leads to greater ambiguity and legal uncertainty.  We need to do it 
once, not multiple times, as the failings of our drafts reveal, where the courts increasingly 
intervene.

	And finally, we need to make those decisions quickly.  I'm guided by the view 
that a decision made too late is no decision at all.  We are undergoing a serious effort to 
build the organizational management and the procedures to meet this simple credo.

	The second prong that I am immensely proud of, and I think has become critical, 
is that the agency has to build its own strong, independent, technical capability.  It has to 
become fluent in technology.  I have seen for too long the dangers of being involved in a 
regulatory action and being dependent on companies to not only give us the presentation 
of their own position, but teach us the underpinnings of their technology before we can 
make a legitimate decision.
  
	In a world governed by technological giants, if the Commission is to maintain its 
independence and its viability, it has to have a strong technical and engineering 
component, and this is one of our highest priorities.  We are facing a grave situation.  In 
the engineering function at the FCC, within four years, 40 percent of our engineers will 
be eligible for retirement.  

	We have built a program called "Excellence in Engineering" that includes the 
opportunity to recruit more aggressively, create greater personnel-flexibility rules to 
allow us to compete effectively for engineering and technical talent.  We have built an 
indigenous training program so that engineers and technologists can remain current in 
their fields, sponsoring programs and partnerships with laboratories and universities 
around the country.

	We hope that this will stem the tide and turn it around, and I'm going to take
this opportunity to make a pitch.  Anyone looking for a job, contact us at, 
“www.fcc.gov/jobs.”  I assure you, we are hunting aggressively.

	And I've also heard the cries of your industry about the slowness in our laboratory 
and our ability to get through the equipment-certification process.  It's something we've 
been aggressively working on, and I'm proud of the strides we've made, but we know we 
need more.  We have focused heavily on backlog reduction and have made a substantial 
contribution there.

	I also want to announce that we have been well aware of the hangups associated 
with issues dealing with cellular and PCS technologies and RF-safety issues.  The 
Commission is no longer waiting for the consensus to develop.  Regardless of what the 
IEEE does, the Commission will issue measurement procedures for RF safety by the end 
of this month.  Hopefully, at the completion of training and putting procedures in place, 
we will allow telecom-certification bodies to be able to handle certification of hand-held 
products no later than October 1st of this year.

	And as I said, we are working to increase the Commission's engineering staff.  
Our goal is that, with very few exceptions, all equipment-authorization applications 
should be acted on within 30 days of receipt.

	The final dimension to this technical fluency is we're building a FCC University.  
Not only do engineers need to gain grounding in technical concepts and technical 
fluency, but so do attorneys and so do economists.  The Commission is actively building 
a curriculum, a system of formalized training.

	We're inviting engineers and technologists and professors and scientists and 
companies to contribute to our educational effort.  Employees are going to be graded in 
their performance reviews on their continuing development and commitment to 
technological principles.  I hope this is a hallmark of our tenure and will make the 
Commission a more effective place.

	So, in conclusion, as history has so often shown us, human progress, the march of 
science, cannot be indefinitely constrained.  Someone is going to see the blue waters of 
the Pacific Ocean.  Some Magellan will find the path through and circumnavigate the 
globe, and just like with those migrations, the world will be changed forever.  Who 
exactly and how it will be done are still a mystery, but the inevitable truth of the 
accomplishment, to my mind, is unassailable.  And so with that, I thank you for having 
me here.  It's been a pleasure being with you. 

	 Thank you.
		

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