Gadgetory

hey guys it's me I with virg and i'm here with FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski apparently in Miami no we're at CES in Las Vegas the Chairman gave a speech yesterday you talked a little bit about opening up wireless spectrum there's a ton of products in the show floor what's your favorite thing that you see so you know to my favorite part of CES is the fact that every single product is internet connected and almost every single product is wirelessly connected if you shut down the internet if you shut down wireless not a single thing on the floor would work I want to I want to get right into the importance of the internet you have been a champion of net neutrality and you you broke it what i would call compromise net neutrality solution you know you you mean this is your policy or your believe in that neutrality yes yes okay as long as you start there are you a reddit reader do you know read it is yet so right it's going to shut itself down on january teen because they're protesting sopa and SOPA their provisions in sofa that would kind of damage the net neutrality structure and wikipedia might join the protest and facebook twitter they've talked about it google's talk about it's a big deal where are you on sofa well there clearly are issues that have to be addressed yeah entire sees problem sure you know absolutely we have to find a way to protect intellectual property and not break the internet what do you mean do you think soap is that way is it is a we had a solution uh you know what listen clearly it's being debated by congress and something that Congress should debate but there's just no question that we have to preserve and this is why we felt so strongly about net neutrality we have to preserve the magic of the internet the openness of the Internet and make sure that we continue to provide incentives for content creators to to create content so does it mean does it speak to you when a site like reddit which is totally community driven right everything on reddit is driven by its community huge community when they're saying this is so important to us that we will shut it down and sort of the internet the larger population of just citizens on the internet is freaking out about this I mean I they tell me they're freaking out about it all the time does that speak to you sort of on a personal level absolutely i mean one of the great things about the internet as it creates a platform of forum for people to express their views and I think those views are being heard and it's important you know people are attached not just to the information the services they get on the internet they're attached to the concept of a free and open Internet that we have and it's great to see participation in our system and a vocal expression of a sudden you know we want to preserve the internet that we have okay so I mean I want it just is the right of thing is to me is very interesting that you know it's such an outcry and I we always wonder I mean just Washington see it do they see what's happening on the ground and my email when people are sending me animated gifs of like the Internet blowing up you get those to get a lot of animated gifs in your email listen people participation in public policy issues is really important people do pay attention and I think it's hot yes sir you gave a speech say talk about opening spectrum you know incentive auctions making spectrum easier to get to but more prosaically let's talk about maximizing the spectrum that we have and one of the themes of the show floor is you've got verizon pushing LTE really hard 18 t is coming out with a bunch of LTE devices here sprint demoed its first LTE devices do you think that there should be is kind of a I know the rule cellular Association is pushing for kind of interoperability do you think that that's something the agency the cap I'm sorry the Commission should get involved with do you hear that call you think it's going to happen or you waiting for them to do an end no listen interoperability is something that would really help drive and improve mobile ecosystem it's one of a number of things that we need to take seriously no one expected several years ago that we would be where we are now with a an incredibly robust innovative mobile economy we've regained world leadership in mobile are our apps economy is the envy of the world we are leading the world in deployment of 4G the next generation of mobile you know we've been focused on the opportunities of wireless what we need to do with our wireless infrastructure and echo system to get this right as you know in many many ways things are great we know exactly what the biggest threat to our mobile economy is and that is the spectrum crunch it's the fact that all of the demand that's generated by the applications and services that we love to use it's going up like that wouldn't and the supply a spectrum is going like that I'm a verizon customer and I say this network is choked I'm at CS LT is choked I could show my phone and switch to ATT because it was interoperable and wouldn't that be like on the ground real world solution wouldn't that help sure it listen you know promoting driving competition in the mobile economy is something that's important I think we've proven recently how important it is to us now seriously we take it you know competition in our economy is what drives investment at what r it's what drives innovation and you know across the board we're locking the fonz that we're looking to foster the most competitive mobile economy are we working towards an hour operability than as a policy or we study taking kind of a step back people use interoperability to refer to a couple of different things there's there's a the interoperability of spectrum that rural carriers received at auction and whether there are chips for those to be on interoperable with other networks it's largely a roaming issue right and then there's the ability of consumers to switch between carriers more easily and I think that would really foster direct competition yes no and you know it's a it's an issue that we continue to look at people don't know that you actually can get phones now without a two-year contract right now you have to pay more still lock to it give me your technologically law to carrier though right you can get a phone about to your contract on AT&T but we're going to take it and I think that's really the problem is the technological problems yeah I think that's fair and I think working toward you know a mechanism that provides real competition that also provides incentives to invest in networks you know one of the mistakes we can't make is to push forward a set of policies that result in networks that are slow congested problematic and so it's important as we look at all the different issues to say look we know what we want we want to maximize competition we want to maximize investment network so we have fast networks we want to make sure that the platforms are open to innovators and entrepreneurs so that we can keep the apps economy growing and thriving those are the things that we're focused on so we have four big carriers right and t-mobile they have gone they went through an issue at the SEC strongly opposed the merger they're trying to figure out what to do sprint they're going LTE they're saying to address our spectrum needs we don't really have many to go out and buy a bunch of spectrum well we'll go to light squared and wide squared is this I mean I get press releases from y squared every day saying we signed up a new partner and I'm I always wonder where what network are they going to run on because they did they're waiting for you what's the worst case scenario for LightSquared the worst case I you know I'm not sure I'll tell you what the status of it is a we are pushing across the board to free up spectrum for mobile broadband and to remove restrictions on spectrum use so they can be more spectrum available for mobile broadband we also have an obligation to make sure that new uses don't cause interference to products and devices that consumers are using and what's happening in this situation is that interference issue has been raised its legitimate interference issue right now it's being tested and that's the process we should have this comes up all the time you know whenever over time the FCC has looked to authorize new uses of spectrum it raises interference issues the way to resolve these kinds of issues is by letting the engineers through an inclusive process test the interference and that'll determine the path in the outcome so one of the other huge themes at CS has been televisions smart television smart televisions changing delivery of the television yeah I don't think smart televisions are going to be successful until they can integrate television until they can bring in cable satellite traditional methods of delivery right now they're kind of limited by cable card right that's that's the way the you authenticate digital cable in America the cable card is kind of in it in terms of opening up the platform has been somewhat of a failure how are you how do you evaluate that as you see the industry desperately trata to push for Smart TVs yeah listen you're completely right that when you when you look at the different platforms the innovation that we've seen on you know call it the living room platform is behind what other players so you know internet millions of apps mobile hundreds of thousands of apps I think it's over a million a living room a smaller number and we've been talking about now we've been talking about that for a couple of years here's the good news the trend in innovation around the living room TVs content is a very positive one and so the the innovation that we're seeing now the choices for consumers and the ways the the content that they can access on their TV is changing in a very positive way it reminds me in some ways of Wi-Fi you know the carrier's initially didn't like Wi-Fi the kind of license carriers and if you remember back it used to be that when you got a mobile phone it wasn't compatible with right Wi-Fi just didn't work and over time the carriers realized actually Wi-Fi was a net plus for consumers and for their businesses and started to integrate it and now we're in a world where the default has flipped so on tablets all of a sudden Wi-Fi is the default and cellular is the option seeing that path around the living room so you think I p television will become the default and traditional broadcast delivery with it I'm not sure it's a different you know it's a different platform it's a different set of players but the point is we've definitely seen over the last couple years a a willingness and in fact a drive to provide more to consumers on the video platform than anyone would have expected you know no one would have said a few years ago that it would be easy for you to get netflix and youtube for example on your living room TV you know no one would have said that it would have been easy to get programming on a tablet and those things are starting to happen and we're going to continue to push innovation in this platform but to draw the parallel to phones the thing that makes Wi-Fi powerful on a phone is that it operates in parallel in an integrated way to the 3g so you're on Wi-Fi leave the house and flips over 3g it's invisible to the user right now regular television is one thing internet delivery is another thing and it's really hard to integrate them do you think the and I'll you know netflix on TV is driven by samsung it's not driven by comcast and comcast doesn't let you have netflix on their devices well not just buy stamps on netflix arrives on a TV through an internet connection provide that we made provided by whoever the provider is that we made sure it stays open for providers like netflix and that's an important thing it's why we were focused on it and it's why companies like Netflix can get to the TV and it's why companies like Samsung or seeing benefit in offering internet-connected smart TVs and so I'm not saying there aren't issues here there are but we're seeing a trend toward more innovation more access then people thought was possible a few years ago we want to see that trend continue and your point about Wi-Fi is good one that's that you know that is one way to think about a historical model for where we can get to with the innovation in the living room what do you want to see last question what do you want to see the next five years well we want to see ubiquitous broadband in the United States everyone both having access to broadband and having a real connection to broadband we have to gaps when it comes to accessibility one is there are still parts of the country that don't have infrastructure the other is there are still many many people who could have broadband but don't subscribe for various reasons we want to see ubiquitous broadband Ellie's going out together yes absolutely and that brings me to my next thing we want to see a robust thriving mobile economy and we need to tackle the spectrum crunch which again is the single biggest risk that our mobile economy faces and those are the things that we're focused on great Oh chairman thank you so much for talking us to that gets ESN