 Good morning everybody. Thank you for everyone who's here at Vox Media headquarters in Washington DC and for all of you who are viewing our live stream at theverge.com or FCC.gov. It's a real honor to be here. My name is Jim Banchoff and I'm the chairman and CEO of Vox Media. We're publishers of sites like SB Nation, The Verge, and soon Polygon. It's a great honor for us to host Chairman Julius Genachowski of the FCC this morning who will be making a major policy speech and we're honored to have him here and honored that all of you have attended as well. Without further ado I'm going to run a quick video that will explain a little bit about Vox Media. I recognize it might we might be a new company and a new face for a lot of you so we're going to show a quick clip and hopefully get everyone's blood flowing and explain the company a little bit. I'm Josh Topolsky welcome to On the Verge. Welcome back to SB Nation. We're here with Polygon. Integrated Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. We're looking at the best style for your iPad. This is really cool we're in the Microsoft Model Shop. Every year you have a chance to own the New York Yankees in horse racing. A bunch of protesters stand behind me. I wanted to be here today to document it all. We are a couple weeks out from the release of Max Payne 3. We've been hiring a lot of different people with a lot of different experience from different parts of the industry. We're going to learn how to become driving ninjas. The internet is the dream platform for scammers. It is the first free-to-play shooter on the console. Yes indeed. That's pretty incredible. Every game of the World Series I use drugs. It's one of the best feelings ever to walk out on a Sunday thousands of people screaming. I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world. Thanks. So that gives a little overview of who we are as Vox Media and what you can see from the video and if you check out our websites is that we are a digitally native web native company and that's why it's so appropriate and we're so honored to host this session. Our company would not exist without broadband. It's not just the media that we create but it's the infrastructure that runs our company. It enables our 200 plus employees and a thousand plus paid contributors all of which by the way are jobs that were created in the past four years and all of which were created by broadband. So we take this issue very seriously and this this address is therefore very appropriate. Chairman Genachowski and I met in 2007. I had recently left my job at AOL and he was beginning the next chapter of his career following a very successful tenure as an internet executive and investor. We were both ready to embark on the next phase of our careers as digital entrepreneurs but we shared a problem that was common to a lot of early stagers. We didn't have an office. The chairman took matters into his own hands and got a place and quickly he became my landlord. We subleased the space down in Chinatown and while Julius was setting up Launchbox which is an incubator focused on helping early stage companies to reach their full potential, I started working on what was then SB Nation and has now become Vox Media. As office mates our friendship grew. We spent many hours talking about the vast potential of consumer and enterprise businesses that were being enabled by broadband. And we also talked a lot about baseball. Soon Julius had been appointed to lead the FCC. Those of us who understood the opportunities for the United States brought on by the massive transformation in broadband and communications were thrilled to have a chairman who was not only an accomplished legal scholar, public servant, and corporate executive but someone who had also innovated and created jobs at the grassroots level. As we awaited confirmation the then chairman-elect continued to share an office with us. Of course we were growing as was his staff and it's a proud part of Vox Media's heritage and history that we had to compete for a conference room space with the future FCC leadership. Fast forward to today. SB Nation has morphed into Vox Media. We've grown from one full-time employee, our founder Tyler Blizinski, to 200 full-time employees and over 1,000 paid freelancers all within the past four years. Our media properties like The Verge, SB Nation, and soon to launch Polygon reach over 30 million visitors each month. And in fact literally just a few minutes ago we launched our most ambitious upgrade in our history with a bold new SB Nation platform that is optimized for the post PC era of smartphones and tablets. Check it out, little plug, SB Nation.com. Chairman Genachowski is leading the FCC in America's broadband roadmap and my New York Yankees and Julius's Washington Nationals are both in first place in their respective divisions. So not too shabby in the past four years. Since being sworn in as chairman of the FCC in June 2009 Chairman Genachowski has focused the agency on unleashing the opportunities of wired and wireless broadband. He has successfully pursued policies to promote investment and job creation, drive innovation, foster competition, and empower consumers. During his tenure the FCC developed and is implementing the National Broadband Plan, an ambitious strategy to harness the opportunities of high-speed internet, promote US global competitiveness, and bring the benefits of 21st century communications to all Americans. The Commission has worked to modernize outdated programs and eliminate barriers to innovation and investment. The Commission adopted the landmark Connect America Fund, a once-in-a-generation overhaul of the multi-billion dollar Universal Service Fund and its related rules transforming it from supporting telephone service to broadband. The Connect America Fund replaces legacy programs with new market-driven incentive-based policies to achieve universal broadband both wired and wireless. Through the Commission's Broadband Acceleration Initiative the chairman has advanced policies that reduce cost and time required to deploy broadband infrastructure including streamlining the process for attaching communications equipment to utility poles and wireless towers. The agency has taken strong steps to preserve internet freedom and openness adopting a framework to protect free enterprise and free speech online, incentivizing significant private investment in internet applications and services as well as broadband networks and infrastructure. Today Chairman Genachowski is going to outline in a major policy address where we as a country can go from here. As a company that has been built on open access to a fast and secure internet, Vox Media is proud to welcome Chairman Julius Genachowski. Jim thank you so much for for that great introduction and for reminding me of what was really just such a fun time in our lives and it's great to be back. It's great to be back. I don't know what you all were doing last night. I was watching Monday Night Football and I fell asleep. Did I miss anything? Wow. I thought the FCC got a lot of complaints about dropped calls. Anyway seriously Jim thank you. Thanks to Vox Media for hosting this. I know it's a big day. You're relaunching SB Nation and that you took the time to host this. So many of you are here listening to some points about policy. I appreciate it very much. All of you should know Jim Bancroft has established himself as one of the great innovators in online media. Seizing the opportunities of the internet SB Nation has grown a network of more than a thousand contributors in 49 states and the public has responded to this localized content making SB Nation the fastest-growing sports website in America with more than 28 million monthly visitors. Now many of those SB Nation contributors started as commenters and 99% are paid. So SB Nation much like eBay and Amazon, Facebook and Google serves as a platform for entrepreneurial people all over America to create value online and make a living. So when you think about SB Nation just like when you think about these other companies it's not just the hundreds of jobs that Jim Bancroft and his team have created at Vox Media. It's the platform for other work and job creation. It's part of the hidden story of what the broadband revolution can do for our economy and one of the reasons I'm really happy to be here is that this company is a perfect example of it. Of course SB Nation is far from all that that Vox Media is doing. The Verge is the country's fastest-growing tech news site. Polygon is taking on gaming and I have a feeling that Jim and the Vox Media team aren't done yet. Now about this time a year ago I delivered a speech just down the road at Living Social, a pioneer in the daily deals category that's provided value to consumers and small businesses while in a similar way creating hundreds and hundreds of US jobs. I chose to speak there for basically the same reason that I'm speaking here at Vox Media. To illustrate that broadband, high-speed internet, wired and wireless is transforming our economy and the way we live for the better. I'll speak today about how over the past four years the US has regained global leadership in key areas of the broadband economy and is building a strong foundation for the future. But as important I want to talk about how we also face significant challenges, some familiar and some new. Most notably we're in a global bandwidth race. This race will help determine who creates jobs and grows GDP in this flat, competitive, innovation driven global economy. Now and over the next decade US leadership will require a strategic bandwidth advantage. Fast, high-capacity and ubiquitous broadband. To secure this advantage for our country the private and public sectors both have important roles. Seizing the opportunities of big bandwidth will bring enormous benefits and failure to do so will have real and negative consequences. Now I'll try to keep my remarks here brief, at least brief by policy speech standards. A longer version that elaborates on some of the points that I'll make will be available at FCC.gov and I encourage you to go to FCC.gov anyway and learn about what we're doing. So let's start with the good news. Our increasingly knowledge-based economy is powered by broadband and our broadband economy and its foundation have come a long way in the past four years both in absolute terms and relative to our global competitors. It wasn't long ago that Asia and Europe were ahead of the US in broadband powered innovation and infrastructure. Take mobile. In 2008 Businessweek described America as having been a wireless backwater. We were talking then about Europe's lead on 3G and about the vibrant mobile innovation in countries like Japan and South Korea. But thanks to innovative American companies, software, mobile, broadband providers and others and to smart government policies the story today is different. It's one of comeback and leadership. After trailing in key 3G metrics we're now leading the world in deploying the next generation of wireless broadband networks 4G LTE at scale. Today we have 69% of the world's LTE subscribers and every expectation to maintain 4G leadership for the foreseeable future. The United States has become the global testbed for LTE apps and services. America is leading too in the software driven apps and services running on these networks. More than 80% of smartphones sold today throughout the world run on operating systems developed by US companies. That's up from less than 25% three years ago. An amazing shift. And US companies are the clear leaders in the tablet sector worldwide accounting for roughly three-quarters of tablets sold and for the operating systems on almost all tablets. The explosion of tablet use is just incredible. The percentage of American adults using tablets and e-readers has leapt from 2% to 30% in just three years. Today's smartphone and tablet powered apps economy already massive but still in the early innings is fundamentally a made-in-the-USA phenomenon and a very recent one. In June 2008 there was no app store. In June 2012 the Apple and Android app stores alone had collective 3 billion downloads. It's a hundred million apps a day. On wired broadband infrastructure we've made major progress too. At the beginning of 2009 broadband networks capable of a hundred megabits per second passed less than 20% of US homes. That number is over 80% today putting the US for the moment near the top of the world and deployment of high-speed broadband infrastructure. And according to Akamai's latest state of the internet report the average speeds actually used in the US are up almost 30% in just one year from 2011 to 2012. Now smartphones and tablets require both wireless and wired infrastructure. Without Wi-Fi smartphones and tablets would have far less value and Wi-Fi wouldn't have been possible without a and Wi-Fi wouldn't be possible without a wired broadband infrastructure as well as FCC policies that enabled Wi-Fi use on unlicensed spectrum. Wi-Fi now drives over 40% of mobile internet connections and over 92% of tablet internet connections in the US. What some people call heterogeneous networks wired and wireless broadband are powering other key growth industries like cloud computing. With firms like Amazon, Apple, Google, Rackspace, Box and others the US pioneered and continues to lead the fast-growing cloud computing industry delivering real benefits to businesses and consumers. So broadband is an essential platform for job creation and investment and we can see that in what's happened over the last several years. Mobile innovation is estimated to have created 1.6 million US jobs over the past five years and the nascent apps economy has already created nearly 500,000 US jobs. Companies delivering cloud services added 80,000 new jobs in 2010 not counting the many jobs they helped create by boosting productivity and lowering costs for businesses large and small. From 2009 to 2011 annual investment in wired and wireless networks increased about 30% to more than 60 billion dollars even in this challenging economy. This wave of broadband related investment and innovation in the US over the past few years it's just the beginning. The benefits for education, for health care, energy and public safety are all proving themselves out right now through amazing inventors and entrepreneurs. Now I'm pleased that a reinvigorated FCC has been part of this positive story. The FCC has helped lay a foundation for success by modernizing rules for the broadband age and ensuring a climate for investment and innovation throughout the broadband ecosystem. We developed America's first national broadband plan transformed an outdated universal service program that was telephone oriented into the Connect America fund the largest US broadband infrastructure program ever. We've unleashed licensed and unlicensed spectrum for mobile innovation removed regulatory barriers to lower the cost of broadband deployment enacted a strong common-sense framework to preserve internet freedom and openness and take in strong steps to protect competition. Of course the country's work is not done. Progress in broadband over the past four years is real and significant but we shouldn't declare victory not in this fast-moving and globally competitive sector. Challenges to US leadership are real. Some of these challenges are a consequence of our own success. The internet is an American invention and whether it's Google or Facebook, Netflix or Hulu, Amazon or eBay, Twitter or Dropbox the examples are endless. American innovators have driven dramatic increases in demand for broadband whether mobile or at home, work or school. This rush of demand is creating real challenges. Real challenges to the broadband infrastructure and to other broadband policies. Well bring it on. These are the kinds of challenges America wants to have. Too much demand is much better than too little and these are the kinds of challenges we can meet and overcome. In general the challenges to US leadership in the broadband economy come from technology powered developments. This is a flat world where capital can flow and innovators can work anywhere and in this 24-7 information world it's no secret anywhere that broadband is a ticket to a country's economic success. I've met with senior government officials and business leaders throughout the world and I can tell you that they are all focused on the broadband opportunity. Whether it's Korea, China, the EU, Australia, on and on all have plans to deploy ultra high-speed broadband on a wide scale to become a magnet for innovators and capital. We are in a global bandwidth race. A nation's future economic security is tied to frictionless and speedy access to information. The faster we can connect our citizens the faster our economy can grow. The more people of all walks of life that have access to bandwidth the more opportunity we spread for all and much like the space race in the 20th century success in this race will unleash waves of innovation that will go a long way toward determining who leads our global economy in the 21st century. Now US leadership in internet innovation wired and wireless starts with our remarkable innovators and entrepreneurs. It's why it's so important that we have world-class education in the United States and smart immigration policies like Senator Schumer's new bill to make more green cards available to foreign graduates of US universities with advanced math science and engineering degrees. World-leading talent in the US is necessary but it's not sufficient. We also need world-leading digital infrastructure. Our challenge is to ensure that the US has a strategic bandwidth advantage. This is a point first made by the architect of our national broadband plan Blair Levin and Tom Friedman has written persuasively on this as well. What do I see as the elements of developing a strategic bandwidth advantage? I see three key pieces broadband speed capacity and ubiquity. We need people to have the bandwidth they need when and where they need it whether you're a high-tech innovator, large or small business or a consumer at home or on the go. Now let me describe what I mean by speed capacity and ubiquity and why each is important and let me suggest what a broadband ecosystem with these three elements will require. So start with faster speeds. Speed matters because innovators need next-generation speed for next-generation innovations. Genetic sequencing for cancer patients, immersive and creative software to help children learn, ways for small businesses to take advantage of big data and speed and capacity heavy innovations we can't even imagine. Businesses and consumers need high speeds to take advantage of services like cloud computing every day. These can make every smartphone tablet and laptop capable of harnessing the power of the world's largest supercomputers and capable of accessing the petabytes of vast data centers. As President Obama has said to lead the world to a new future of productivity and prosperity we have to connect all of America to 21st century infrastructure and raise the standards for broadband speed. More capacity. We're experiencing a revolution in how we consume and generate data. The internet used to be a text-heavy website on a computer screen. Today is streaming video on your TV set, your smartphone, your tablet, video conferencing, telework, cloud storage and more. Look at SB Nation. Most of its content when it got off the ground, I remember this very well, was static text, a few pictures on a network of blogs. That was then. Today more and more SB Nation is creating high bandwidth valuable video content. Across all of Vox Media sites the number of videos being posted is up 1200% over the past year. This explosion of online video and other high bandwidth applications and services leading internet users to consume more and more data every month. To maximize the opportunities of broadband for our economy, consumers need sufficient monthly broadband capacity to make e-commerce routine and unconstrained. To maximize the opportunities of broadband for education, healthcare and other important national priorities, consumers need sufficient monthly broadband capacity so that families with school-age children won't have to fight over who gets to use the internet for homework. A distance learner can take a full course load online. A senior with diabetes can have regular online video consultations with a doctor in another town. Ubiquity. By ubiquity I mean this. Broadband should be available to everyone, anywhere, anytime. This means that our fastest, latest wireless broadband networks should cover at least 98% of the country as the president set as a goal. That no American should be without a broadband option and that we must change the fact that nearly one in three Americans remain unconnected at home. The phrase universal broadband is often used to cover these concepts and it's a good phrase. I'm using ubiquity today to emphasize the increasing importance of mobile broadband. What's the goal in focusing on speed, capacity and ubiquity? The goal is removing bandwidth and location as constraints on innovation. Let me be more concrete on the vision. First, as we said in our national broadband plan, we need innovation hubs in the US with ultra-fast broadband with speed measured in gigabits, not megabits. There have been some positive developments on this front in Kansas City. Google has now launched the first large-scale commercial effort to bring one gigabit per second service to a residential market. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, the community-owned utility installed 100% fiber to the premises network, making speeds up to one gigabit per second available to all residences, businesses and institutions. And the Gig U initiative led by Blair Levin has already catalyzed over 200 million dollars in private investment to build ultra-high speed hubs in the communities of many leading research universities. These efforts provide essential testbeds for developing and testing the data-rich technologies of our future. But we need more innovation hubs than we can count on one hand. We need a critical mass of communities that have the most robust bandwidth in the world, where broadband abundance is a fact of life, so that private sector innovators and the research community can invent and test tomorrow's essential services with a meaningful number of potential users. Now second, we need to ensure that truly high-speed, high-capacity broadband plans are the norm widely, not the exception. In the national broadband plan, we set a goal of affordable 100 megabit per second service to a hundred million Americans, to a hundred million households by 2020. We set this goal so that America in 2020 would have the largest market in the world for high-speed broadband. Now we've made significant progress toward that goal, but we need to get faster, sooner. Many of today's services already depend or thrive at those speeds, video conferencing and cloud services for example, particularly when there are multiple users in a home or business. Without a mass market to consume those services in the US, we risk innovators, startups and established companies looking elsewhere. Now third, we need to make sure that even the hardest to reach areas of our country and the least advantaged among us share in the benefits of broadband as each new wave of applications moves from novelty to necessity. All Americans should have access to a network that provides a baseline of service sufficient to connect them to our modern economy and to education, healthcare and public safety resources. And fourth, we need to build on our global lead in the deployment of 4G wireless networks and keep pushing to make sure we're the first in 5G and beyond. Not only is this vital to meet the nation's exploding mobile broadband demand, but it's the only way we'll remain a world leader in mobile innovation. We have our work cut out for us and despite America's broadband resurgence, here are a few key reasons we can't let up. Consider the evolution of competition driven upgrades to our wireline networks over the past two decades. We've gone from DOCSIS to DSL and more. We need the upgrade cycle to continue, which raises important questions. Who will push the next round of upgrades and when? How can we ensure that we see the network upgrades our innovation economy needs? Now despite the significant improvements in US broadband infrastructure, the average speeds that Americans actually use appear to lag those in some other countries including Korea and Japan. So whether it's because higher speed services here are more expensive or for other reasons, Americans aren't adopting high-speed services as fast as some of our global competitors. And roughly 30% of Americans are still not connected to home broadband at all. In mobile, we face additional challenges. US mobile data traffic grew almost 300% last year and driven by 4G LTE smartphones and tablets, traffic is projected to grow in additional 16-fold by 2016. With this exponential growth, demand for our wireless capacity is on pace to exceed supply even with significant new spectrum coming online. Congested networks are slower networks. So what can our country do to meet these challenges to have a strategic bandwidth advantage? We must drive massive private investment in both networks and applications, a virtuous cycle where innovative applications drive user demand for bandwidth which generates returns and incentives for network providers to invest in speed, capacity, and ubiquity which in turn enables further innovation, more demand, more network investment, and on we go. Some say government has no role to play here. Government should just eliminate existing rules and policies on its way out the door. Now someone who spent more than a decade in the private sector and believes fundamentally in the power of the free market, I disagree with that view. We don't have to choose between having broadband policies that drive global leadership and believing in a free market. It's a false choice. A smart broadband policy puts a well-functioning free market with healthy competition as a core objective. Government has a role to play, limited but vital, light touch not no touch. When it comes to promoting fast high-capacity and ubiquitous broadband networks there are three key areas where the FCC should act. First, we need to keep driving improvements in broadband infrastructure and accessibility. We need to continue removing barriers to broadband build-out, lowering the cost of infrastructure deployment. Spectrum, which the FCC manages, is our invisible infrastructure and we need to address the spectrum crunch both by unleashing more airwaves for broadband and significantly increasing the efficiency of spectrum use by moving forward on sharing and small cell technologies. We're also moving forward with a major policy innovation called incentive auctions to move spectrum from over-the-air broadcasting to mobile broadband. These are all parts of the solution and parts of what government needs to do. And we need to continue to implement programs like the Connect America Fund and broadband adoption efforts for low-income Americans that will help ensure that no one is cut off from the broadband economy wherever they live. Second, we need to protect and promote competition. Competition is the lifeblood of our free market economy, driving private investment, innovation, and consumer value. The more competition the less need for regulation. We know from decades of experience that when it comes to competition in the communication sector the FCC needs to be a cop on the beat. This means continuing to fairly and rigorously review all transactions that come before us, distinguishing between efficiency enhancing deals that serve the public interest and should be approved without issue and those that threaten harm to competition and consumers. It means an obligation to consider all options, divestitures, blocking deals, and imposing conditions. And it means vigorously enforcing conditions on transactions so companies can't flout or work around their obligations. It means that when the data shows that our rules no longer reflect the competitive landscape or aren't serving their intended purpose, we need to be willing to take a fresh look based on the best data about the state of the market and act to preserve competition. Promoting competition also means we need to keep a close eye on developments in places like Kansas City to see what additional steps federal, state, and local governments can take to encourage game-changing investments by disruptive new broadband competitors. We need to increase transparency, which helps make markets work more efficiently. And although there isn't unanimous agreement on this point and others I've mentioned at the FCC, protecting competition sometimes means putting rules in place to prevent anti-competitive practices. Rules we adopted last year by majority vote to ensure broadband data roaming is one example. Now of course government bodies including state and local agencies must do their part to encouraging competition and innovation and certainly not erecting roadblocks. There's a debate right now in the news here in Washington DC on rules that could discourage the innovative on-demand cars car service company Uber. Not hard to guess which side I'm on. I'm on the side of innovation. To be clear, competition is vital throughout the broadband economy not just for communications networks but the Commission focuses primarily on these networks. That's where I focused my remarks. And third and related, we need to preserve open platforms. It's the Internet's openness and freedom, the ability to speak, innovate, and engage in commerce and free enterprise without having to ask for anyone's permission that's enabled its unparalleled success. It's why we adopted common-sense rules of the road to preserve a free and open Internet and to foster the virtuous cycle of massive investment in both edge and the core of broadband networks. These rules which we adopted two years ago have increased certainty and predictability for innovators and investors throughout the space. In fact, in the two years since the FCC adopted our open Internet framework, investment has increased, innovation has increased throughout the broadband economy at the edge and at the core. We're also fighting to protect the Internet as an engine of innovation and free expression internationally. In the context of UN negotiations, which will come to a head at the end of this year, some countries are proposing to fundamentally change the way the Internet works and impose a new layer of international control on the free flow of information and data online. These kinds of growth-killing proposals must be rejected. So yes, we've made a ton of progress in the United States, but the threats and challenges are very real. We can't be satisfied with where we are. We have to keep focusing on speed, capacity, and ubiquity and take the necessary steps to ensure a strategic bandwidth advantage for the US in the 21st century. We have to keep looking over our shoulders at what other parts of the world are doing and keep asking ourselves the big questions like, is our broadband infrastructure providing a strategic bandwidth advantage? Are we winning the global bandwidth race? Are we delivering to the country broadband performance that's the envy of the world? If we keep the pedal to the floor, including through smart government policies, we can ensure we have the innovation infrastructure we need to preserve and extend US leadership in the global broadband economy. In that world, we all win. Broadband applications and service companies, broadband network companies, our economy, and all consumers. Working together, we can do this. Thank you. This is the transition? This is the transition. So for those of you who are watching the live stream, bear with us for probably no more than 90 seconds or so while we make a quick stage transition here and we'll be right back. Welcome back everyone who's out the live stream. So we only have a short period of time but we wanted to make sure that we got to some questions. I'll ask something and then Eli is going to ask questions that came directly from the audience at The Verge, www.theverge.com if you want to follow along. Chairman, thank you. Your speech and vision for broadband and our policy in America is inspired and as I think you know coming here, you're preaching not only to the converted but to the rabidly converted and so we want to help and I think most of the people who are watching on the stream want to help as well. It's an election year. It's one of those few opportunities that we as citizens have to make a big difference with our vote and our other actions. What we're trying to figure out is, at least from my perspective, I hear what you're saying and I think gosh it's great for all Americans and you know whether you're a Republican or a Democrat your interest is growing our economy and putting people to work and taking a leadership position in a growth area. So my question is for you is who's against it and what do we do to help persuade those who are against it? I'll call them the bad people to frame it in a negative but what can we do as citizens who believe in this to advance this agenda? Well let me the first point I'd make is that I think the largest enemy is indifference. It's not believing that issues around our broadband infrastructure really matter to our economy, to education, to health care and indifference is an insidious enemy. It's how do you combat indifference? Don't be indifferent and what does that mean? I mean what it means get engaged. One of the things that I'm proud that we did at the FCC was we really opened it up to input from people wherever they are. In the old days if you wanted to have input at the FCC you had to hire a lawyer, have them write down some stuff on a filing, file it and someone would read it maybe. Everything we do now is live online. Everyone on the outside can have input into our proceedings. People can have input as individuals whether they're innovators, whether they're people at universities etc. They can do it as individuals or they can band together as people do and say hey we have a view. That stuff matters. The other thing I'd say is ideas matter and we've got some great ideas over the last few years from people on the outside who use the channel to say hey listen you've been talking about this problem. You know you want to see more innovation hubs in the US. Well why don't you think about this. So be engaged and combat indifference is I think my main message. I'm gonna ask some questions from our Verge audience. I know they didn't pull any punches. They did not pull any punches. The number one question that we've gotten, you know the Octagon 5 just came out. It's a big deal. Along with it Apple released iOS 6 which for the first time enables you to make FaceTime calls over cellular. Now the only major restriction on mobile carriers with your open internet rules is that they're not allowed to block other voice and video calling services. But AT&T has blocked FaceTime on iOS 6, FaceTime over cellular on iOS 6 unless you get a new plan. And the readers they all want to know. I mean do you think this is a violation of your open internet rules? Are they found a loophole? What's your take? Well this is you know we're gonna continue to have disputes and issues that arise under open internet framework. This is one that could very well come before us in a formal way so I shouldn't comment on specifically. I think there are reports that there may be a formal complaint filed. But let me let me make a couple of general points. One is the best way to resolve disputes over how the internet should continue to roll out is through discussion and multi-stakeholder forums and trying to do the thing that the internet has done many times many very successfully. We adopted the open internet rules because that doesn't always lead to success and sometimes good faith efforts don't resolve things. Many times they do, sometimes they don't. I encourage that process. If it doesn't lead to a resolution and a complaint is filed we will exercise our responsibilities and we will act. Does that mean do you are you okay with AT&T blocking? As I said it may come before us as something we have to make a decision. We have obligations to make decisions on a record based on input on all the facts. So I just can't comment on a specific thing but we're gonna do our job. As we've proven in the past and other situations where complaints have come before us and we've resolved them we've made the tough decisions. Sure. Okay so the next two questions from our readers. It's actually two questions I think it is really one question I think it's really interesting. So this one is from C Westfah. Let me ask the questions first. Does the FCC intend to start making progress on requiring network interoperability, seamless roaming and devices that can be unlocked to work in any carrier? The second part of the question is from greasy taco aficionado who is one of our one of our best commenters actually. How are Apple's competitors supposed to compete when carriers don't allow them to sell the same phone design and multiple carriers thereby not getting the brand recognition and economies of scale that go along with selling more of a single phone? So a couple points. One is you know what we've seen in the mobile marketplace in the last four years is probably unlike any business revolution any consumer and business revolution that we've ever seen you know in four years to go from a world of the feature phones we used to have to iPhones and Android phones and to tablets like it's just amazing. Making sure that you know in this world we also keep our eye on a couple of balls competition and consumers is important. And so issues like interoperability are issues that we look at. There is an issue with some competing mobile carriers not being able to access devices. Now that issue is less of an issue than it was when the iPhone was first introduced and you can get the iPhone and more and more carriers now. Another issue that we certainly pay attention to and that we acted on is broadband data roaming. So just a very quick story here you know we've there was a an issue that came up in the voice era about whether consumers had a right to expect that their phones would be able to roam on other networks. This is really important for competition because consumers don't want phones that only work some places and not other places and there are many challenges to having multiple providers build out infrastructure everywhere. So voice roaming rules were in place but when I got to the FCC data roaming rules were not and we took that up and we looked at it we said you know what it's really the same issue. Consumers expect national roaming not all competitors can have the infrastructure and we need to adopt these rules to make sure there's broadband data roaming for competitors and consumers. I don't understand to this day why that wasn't a unanimous vote but it wasn't and we have to keep on working hard to explain why it's needed why it's an appropriate role for government how it fosters competition protects consumers and ultimately drives the innovation and investment that comes from a competitive market. So just to follow up on this from my perspective it seems like having slightly more regulation on the network side of things enables an enormous amount of competition on the devices and services side and that's our company that's this device. Do you share that view? I mean do you think there's a room for kind of more regulation interoperability standard setting side sort of on the network layer? Well you know we've been very focused on exactly the point that you're raising which is how do we ensure this vibrant internet-based innovation that we've seen and there's just no question that it's really not disputable that the open nature of the internet has just played a critical role. You know I watched this company as it was founded and so yes you know sometimes government has to act to preserve platforms for innovation that's what the open internet net neutrality debate was all about. Doing it in a smart market-oriented way that recognizes the realities of the marketplace the fact that we really want an open platform for innovators and we also really want robust fast networks that require capital investment it drives you to policy solutions that recognize the importance of both. One of the things I'm proud of is that we were able to do the open internet rules in a way that and you know the facts just prove this out over the last two years have contributed to this virtual cycle. More innovation more demand for consumers more incentive for network companies to invest in wired and wireless infrastructure faster speeds more innovation. Part of what I'm saying today is that's a great cycle we need to speed it up even more we need more speed more capacity and we need to get to ubiquity. Well I think our time is unfortunately coming to a close but thank you thank you for your leadership thank you for your service thank you for coming here today to share this plan with us and I think we all hear the message loud and clear that we have to become active if this vision is really going to continue and we can't take for granted the foundation that companies like Vox Media and so many other great American companies have been built upon so we will fight we'll work together to get it done. For those of you who are watching the live stream obviously go to FCC.gov to get involved to learn more about what Chairman Genachowski is working on and how you can become informed and part of the broadband initiatives here and of course please come to the verge.com where Neelai and his merry group of commenters will also engage in a lively discussion. Thank you everyone who attended thank you everyone who was on the stream have a great day. Thanks.
 Good morning everybody. Thank you for everyone who's here at Vox Media
 headquarters in Washington DC and for all of you who are viewing our live
 stream at theverge.com or FCC.gov. It's a real honor to be here. My name is Jim
 Banchoff and I'm the chairman and CEO of Vox Media. We're publishers of sites like
 SB Nation, The Verge, and soon Polygon. It's a great honor for us to host Chairman
 Julius Genachowski of the FCC this morning who will be making a major
 policy speech and we're honored to have him here and honored that all of you
 have attended as well. Without further ado I'm going to run a quick video that
 will explain a little bit about Vox Media. I recognize it might we might be a
 new company and a new face for a lot of you so we're going to show a quick
 clip and hopefully get everyone's blood flowing and explain the company a little
 bit.
 I'm Josh Topolsky welcome to On the Verge. Welcome back to SB Nation.
 We're here with Polygon. Integrated Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. We're looking at the
 best style for your iPad. This is really cool we're in the Microsoft Model
 Shop. Every year you have a chance to own the New York Yankees in horse racing. A
 bunch of protesters stand behind me. I wanted to be here today to document it
 all. We are a couple weeks out from the release of Max Payne 3. We've been hiring
 a lot of different people with a lot of different experience from different
 parts of the industry. We're going to learn how to become driving ninjas. The
 internet is the dream platform for scammers. It is the first free-to-play
 shooter on the console. Yes indeed. That's pretty incredible. Every game of the
 World Series I use drugs. It's one of the best feelings ever to walk out on a
 Sunday thousands of people screaming. I wouldn't trade it for anything in the
 world. Thanks. So that gives a little overview of who we are as
 Vox Media and what you can see from the video and if you check out our websites
 is that we are a digitally native web native company and that's why it's so
 appropriate and we're so honored to host this session. Our company would not exist
 without broadband. It's not just the media that we create but it's the
 infrastructure that runs our company. It enables our 200 plus employees and a
 thousand plus paid contributors all of which by the way are jobs that were
 created in the past four years and all of which were created by broadband. So we
 take this issue very seriously and this this address is therefore very
 appropriate. Chairman Genachowski and I met in 2007. I had recently left my job
 at AOL and he was beginning the next chapter of his career following a very
 successful tenure as an internet executive and investor. We were both
 ready to embark on the next phase of our careers as digital entrepreneurs but we
 shared a problem that was common to a lot of early stagers. We didn't have an
 office. The chairman took matters into his own hands and got a place and
 quickly he became my landlord. We subleased the space down in Chinatown
 and while Julius was setting up Launchbox which is an incubator focused
 on helping early stage companies to reach their full potential, I started
 working on what was then SB Nation and has now become Vox Media. As office
 mates our friendship grew. We spent many hours talking about the vast potential
 of consumer and enterprise businesses that were being enabled by broadband.
 And we also talked a lot about baseball. Soon Julius had been appointed to lead
 the FCC. Those of us who understood the opportunities for the United States
 brought on by the massive transformation in broadband and
 communications were thrilled to have a chairman who was not only an accomplished
 legal scholar, public servant, and corporate executive but someone who had
 also innovated and created jobs at the grassroots level. As we awaited
 confirmation the then chairman-elect continued to share an office with us. Of
 course we were growing as was his staff and it's a proud part of Vox Media's
 heritage and history that we had to compete for a conference room space with
 the future FCC leadership. Fast forward to today. SB Nation has morphed into Vox
 Media. We've grown from one full-time employee, our founder Tyler Blizinski, to
 200 full-time employees and over 1,000 paid freelancers all within the past
 four years. Our media properties like The Verge, SB Nation, and soon to launch
 Polygon reach over 30 million visitors each month. And in fact literally just a
 few minutes ago we launched our most ambitious upgrade in our history with a
 bold new SB Nation platform that is optimized for the post PC era of
 smartphones and tablets. Check it out, little plug, SB Nation.com. Chairman
 Genachowski is leading the FCC in America's broadband roadmap and my New
 York Yankees and Julius's Washington Nationals are both in first place in
 their respective divisions. So not too shabby in the past four years. Since
 being sworn in as chairman of the FCC in June 2009 Chairman Genachowski has
 focused the agency on unleashing the opportunities of wired and wireless
 broadband. He has successfully pursued policies to promote investment and job
 creation, drive innovation, foster competition, and empower consumers. During
 his tenure the FCC developed and is implementing the National Broadband Plan,
 an ambitious strategy to harness the opportunities of high-speed internet,
 promote US global competitiveness, and bring the benefits of 21st century
 communications to all Americans. The Commission has worked to modernize
 outdated programs and eliminate barriers to innovation and investment. The
 Commission adopted the landmark Connect America Fund, a once-in-a-generation
 overhaul of the multi-billion dollar Universal Service Fund and its related
 rules transforming it from supporting telephone service to broadband. The
 Connect America Fund replaces legacy programs with new market-driven
 incentive-based policies to achieve universal broadband both wired and wireless.
 Through the Commission's Broadband Acceleration Initiative the chairman has
 advanced policies that reduce cost and time required to deploy broadband
 infrastructure including streamlining the process for attaching communications
 equipment to utility poles and wireless towers. The agency has taken strong steps
 to preserve internet freedom and openness adopting a framework to protect
 free enterprise and free speech online, incentivizing significant private
 investment in internet applications and services as well as broadband networks
 and infrastructure. Today Chairman Genachowski is going to outline in a
 major policy address where we as a country can go from here. As a company
 that has been built on open access to a fast and secure
 internet, Vox Media is proud to welcome Chairman Julius Genachowski. Jim thank
 you so much for for that great introduction and for reminding me of what
 was really just such a fun time in our lives and it's great to be back. It's
 great to be back. I don't know what you all were doing last night. I was watching
 Monday Night Football and I fell asleep. Did I miss anything? Wow. I thought the
 FCC got a lot of complaints about dropped calls. Anyway seriously Jim thank
 you. Thanks to Vox Media for hosting this. I know it's a big day. You're
 relaunching SB Nation and that you took the time to host this. So many of
 you are here listening to some points about policy. I appreciate it very much.
 All of you should know Jim Bancroft has established himself as one of the great
 innovators in online media. Seizing the opportunities of the internet SB Nation
 has grown a network of more than a thousand contributors in 49 states and
 the public has responded to this localized content making SB Nation the
 fastest-growing sports website in America with more than 28 million
 monthly visitors. Now many of those SB Nation contributors started as
 commenters and 99% are paid. So SB Nation much like eBay and Amazon, Facebook and
 Google serves as a platform for entrepreneurial people all over America
 to create value online and make a living. So when you think about SB Nation just
 like when you think about these other companies it's not just the hundreds of
 jobs that Jim Bancroft and his team have created at Vox Media. It's the platform
 for other work and job creation. It's part of the hidden story of what the
 broadband revolution can do for our economy and one of the reasons I'm
 really happy to be here is that this company is a perfect example of it. Of
 course SB Nation is far from all that that Vox Media is doing. The Verge is the
 country's fastest-growing tech news site. Polygon is taking on gaming and I have a
 feeling that Jim and the Vox Media team aren't done yet. Now about this time a
 year ago I delivered a speech just down the road at Living Social, a pioneer in
 the daily deals category that's provided value to consumers and small businesses
 while in a similar way creating hundreds and hundreds of US jobs. I chose to speak
 there for basically the same reason that I'm speaking here at Vox Media. To
 illustrate that broadband, high-speed internet, wired and wireless is
 transforming our economy and the way we live for the better. I'll speak today
 about how over the past four years the US has regained global leadership in key
 areas of the broadband economy and is building a strong foundation for the
 future. But as important I want to talk about how we also face significant
 challenges, some familiar and some new. Most notably we're in a global bandwidth
 race. This race will help determine who creates jobs and grows GDP in this flat,
 competitive, innovation driven global economy. Now and over the next decade US
 leadership will require a strategic bandwidth advantage. Fast, high-capacity
 and ubiquitous broadband. To secure this advantage for our country the private
 and public sectors both have important roles. Seizing the opportunities of big
 bandwidth will bring enormous benefits and failure to do so will have real and
 negative consequences. Now I'll try to keep my remarks here brief, at least
 brief by policy speech standards. A longer version that elaborates on some
 of the points that I'll make will be available at FCC.gov and I encourage you
 to go to FCC.gov anyway and learn about what we're doing. So let's start with the
 good news. Our increasingly knowledge-based economy is powered by
 broadband and our broadband economy and its foundation have come a long way in
 the past four years both in absolute terms and relative to our global
 competitors. It wasn't long ago that Asia and Europe were ahead of the US in
 broadband powered innovation and infrastructure. Take mobile. In 2008
 Businessweek described America as having been a wireless backwater. We were
 talking then about Europe's lead on 3G and about the vibrant mobile innovation
 in countries like Japan and South Korea. But thanks to innovative American
 companies, software, mobile, broadband providers and others and to smart
 government policies the story today is different. It's one of comeback and
 leadership. After trailing in key 3G metrics we're now leading the world in
 deploying the next generation of wireless broadband networks 4G LTE at
 scale. Today we have 69% of the world's LTE subscribers and every expectation to
 maintain 4G leadership for the foreseeable future. The United States has
 become the global testbed for LTE apps and services. America is leading too in
 the software driven apps and services running on these networks. More than 80%
 of smartphones sold today throughout the world run on operating systems
 developed by US companies. That's up from less than 25% three years ago. An amazing
 shift. And US companies are the clear leaders in the tablet sector worldwide
 accounting for roughly three-quarters of tablets sold and for the operating
 systems on almost all tablets. The explosion of tablet use is just
 incredible. The percentage of American adults using tablets and e-readers has
 leapt from 2% to 30% in just three years. Today's smartphone and tablet powered
 apps economy already massive but still in the early innings is fundamentally a
 made-in-the-USA phenomenon and a very recent one. In June 2008 there was no app
 store. In June 2012 the Apple and Android app stores alone had collective 3
 billion downloads. It's a hundred million apps a day. On wired broadband
 infrastructure we've made major progress too. At the beginning of 2009 broadband
 networks capable of a hundred megabits per second passed less than 20% of US
 homes. That number is over 80% today putting the US for the moment near the
 top of the world and deployment of high-speed broadband infrastructure. And
 according to Akamai's latest state of the internet report the average speeds
 actually used in the US are up almost 30% in just one year from 2011 to 2012.
 Now smartphones and tablets require both wireless and wired infrastructure. Without
 Wi-Fi smartphones and tablets would have far less value and Wi-Fi wouldn't have
 been possible without a and Wi-Fi wouldn't be possible without a wired
 broadband infrastructure as well as FCC policies that enabled Wi-Fi use on
 unlicensed spectrum. Wi-Fi now drives over 40% of mobile internet connections
 and over 92% of tablet internet connections in the US. What some people
 call heterogeneous networks wired and wireless broadband are
 powering other key growth industries like cloud computing. With firms like
 Amazon, Apple, Google, Rackspace, Box and others the US pioneered and continues to
 lead the fast-growing cloud computing industry delivering real benefits to
 businesses and consumers. So broadband is an essential platform for job creation
 and investment and we can see that in what's happened over the last several
 years. Mobile innovation is estimated to have created 1.6 million US jobs over the
 past five years and the nascent apps economy has already created nearly
 500,000 US jobs. Companies delivering cloud services added 80,000 new jobs in
 2010 not counting the many jobs they helped create by boosting productivity
 and lowering costs for businesses large and small. From 2009 to 2011 annual
 investment in wired and wireless networks increased about 30% to more
 than 60 billion dollars even in this challenging economy. This wave of
 broadband related investment and innovation in the US over the past few
 years it's just the beginning. The benefits for education, for health care,
 energy and public safety are all proving themselves out right now through amazing
 inventors and entrepreneurs. Now I'm pleased that a reinvigorated FCC has
 been part of this positive story. The FCC has helped lay a foundation for success
 by modernizing rules for the broadband age and ensuring a climate for investment
 and innovation throughout the broadband ecosystem. We developed America's first
 national broadband plan transformed an outdated universal service program that
 was telephone oriented into the Connect America fund the largest US broadband
 infrastructure program ever. We've unleashed licensed and unlicensed
 spectrum for mobile innovation removed regulatory barriers to lower the cost of
 broadband deployment enacted a strong common-sense framework to preserve
 internet freedom and openness and take in strong steps to protect competition.
 Of course the country's work is not done. Progress in broadband over the past four
 years is real and significant but we shouldn't declare victory not in this
 fast-moving and globally competitive sector. Challenges to US leadership are
 real. Some of these challenges are a consequence of our own success. The
 internet is an American invention and whether it's Google or Facebook, Netflix
 or Hulu, Amazon or eBay, Twitter or Dropbox the examples are endless.
 American innovators have driven dramatic increases in demand for broadband
 whether mobile or at home, work or school. This rush of demand is creating real
 challenges. Real challenges to the broadband infrastructure and to other
 broadband policies. Well bring it on. These are the kinds of challenges America
 wants to have. Too much demand is much better than too little and these are the
 kinds of challenges we can meet and overcome. In general the challenges to
 US leadership in the broadband economy come from technology powered
 developments. This is a flat world where capital can flow and innovators can work
 anywhere and in this 24-7 information world it's no secret anywhere that
 broadband is a ticket to a country's economic success. I've met with senior
 government officials and business leaders throughout the world and I can
 tell you that they are all focused on the broadband opportunity. Whether it's
 Korea, China, the EU, Australia, on and on all have plans to deploy ultra high-speed
 broadband on a wide scale to become a magnet for innovators and capital. We are
 in a global bandwidth race. A nation's future economic security is tied to
 frictionless and speedy access to information. The faster we can connect
 our citizens the faster our economy can grow. The more people of all walks of
 life that have access to bandwidth the more opportunity we spread for all and
 much like the space race in the 20th century success in this race will
 unleash waves of innovation that will go a long way toward determining who leads
 our global economy in the 21st century. Now US leadership in internet innovation
 wired and wireless starts with our remarkable innovators and entrepreneurs.
 It's why it's so important that we have world-class education in the United
 States and smart immigration policies like Senator Schumer's new bill to make
 more green cards available to foreign graduates of US universities with
 advanced math science and engineering degrees. World-leading talent in the US
 is necessary but it's not sufficient. We also need world-leading digital
 infrastructure. Our challenge is to ensure that the US has a strategic
 bandwidth advantage. This is a point first made by the architect of our
 national broadband plan Blair Levin and Tom Friedman has written persuasively on
 this as well. What do I see as the elements of developing a strategic
 bandwidth advantage? I see three key pieces broadband speed capacity and
 ubiquity. We need people to have the bandwidth they need when and where they
 need it whether you're a high-tech innovator, large or small business or a
 consumer at home or on the go. Now let me describe what I mean by speed capacity
 and ubiquity and why each is important and let me suggest what a broadband
 ecosystem with these three elements will require. So start with faster speeds. Speed
 matters because innovators need next-generation speed for next-generation
 innovations. Genetic sequencing for cancer patients, immersive and creative
 software to help children learn, ways for small businesses to take advantage of
 big data and speed and capacity heavy innovations we can't even imagine.
 Businesses and consumers need high speeds to take advantage of services
 like cloud computing every day. These can make every smartphone tablet and laptop
 capable of harnessing the power of the world's largest supercomputers and
 capable of accessing the petabytes of vast data centers. As President Obama has
 said to lead the world to a new future of productivity and prosperity we have
 to connect all of America to 21st century infrastructure and raise the
 standards for broadband speed. More capacity. We're experiencing a revolution
 in how we consume and generate data. The internet used to be a text-heavy website
 on a computer screen. Today is streaming video on your TV set, your smartphone,
 your tablet, video conferencing, telework, cloud storage and more. Look at SB Nation.
 Most of its content when it got off the ground, I remember this very well, was
 static text, a few pictures on a network of blogs. That was then. Today more and
 more SB Nation is creating high bandwidth valuable video content. Across
 all of Vox Media sites the number of videos being posted is up 1200% over the
 past year. This explosion of online video and other high bandwidth
 applications and services leading internet users to consume more and more
 data every month. To maximize the opportunities of broadband for our
 economy, consumers need sufficient monthly broadband capacity to make e-commerce
 routine and unconstrained. To maximize the opportunities of broadband for
 education, healthcare and other important national priorities, consumers need
 sufficient monthly broadband capacity so that families with school-age children
 won't have to fight over who gets to use the internet for homework. A distance
 learner can take a full course load online. A senior with diabetes can have
 regular online video consultations with a doctor in another town. Ubiquity. By
 ubiquity I mean this. Broadband should be available to everyone, anywhere, anytime.
 This means that our fastest, latest wireless broadband networks should cover
 at least 98% of the country as the president set as a goal. That no American
 should be without a broadband option and that we must change the fact that nearly
 one in three Americans remain unconnected at home. The phrase universal
 broadband is often used to cover these concepts and it's a good phrase. I'm
 using ubiquity today to emphasize the increasing importance of mobile broadband.
 What's the goal in focusing on speed, capacity and ubiquity? The goal is
 removing bandwidth and location as constraints on innovation. Let me be more
 concrete on the vision. First, as we said in our national broadband plan, we need
 innovation hubs in the US with ultra-fast broadband with speed measured
 in gigabits, not megabits. There have been some positive developments on this front
 in Kansas City. Google has now launched the first large-scale commercial effort
 to bring one gigabit per second service to a residential market. In Chattanooga,
 Tennessee, the community-owned utility installed 100% fiber to the premises
 network, making speeds up to one gigabit per second available to all residences,
 businesses and institutions. And the Gig U initiative led by Blair Levin has
 already catalyzed over 200 million dollars in private investment to build
 ultra-high speed hubs in the communities of many leading research universities.
 These efforts provide essential testbeds for developing and testing the data-rich
 technologies of our future. But we need more innovation hubs than we can count
 on one hand. We need a critical mass of communities that have the most robust
 bandwidth in the world, where broadband abundance is a fact of life, so that
 private sector innovators and the research community can invent and test
 tomorrow's essential services with a meaningful number of potential users.
 Now second, we need to ensure that truly high-speed, high-capacity broadband plans
 are the norm widely, not the exception. In the national broadband plan, we set a
 goal of affordable 100 megabit per second service to a hundred million
 Americans, to a hundred million households by 2020. We set this goal so
 that America in 2020 would have the largest market in the world for
 high-speed broadband. Now we've made significant progress toward that goal,
 but we need to get faster, sooner. Many of today's services already depend or thrive
 at those speeds, video conferencing and cloud services for example, particularly
 when there are multiple users in a home or business. Without a mass market to
 consume those services in the US, we risk innovators, startups and established
 companies looking elsewhere. Now third, we need to make sure that even the
 hardest to reach areas of our country and the least advantaged among us share
 in the benefits of broadband as each new wave of applications moves from novelty
 to necessity. All Americans should have access to a network that provides a
 baseline of service sufficient to connect them to our modern economy and
 to education, healthcare and public safety resources. And fourth, we need to
 build on our global lead in the deployment of 4G wireless networks and
 keep pushing to make sure we're the first in 5G and beyond. Not only is this
 vital to meet the nation's exploding mobile broadband demand, but it's the
 only way we'll remain a world leader in mobile innovation. We have our work cut
 out for us and despite America's broadband resurgence, here are a few key
 reasons we can't let up. Consider the evolution of competition driven upgrades
 to our wireline networks over the past two decades. We've gone from DOCSIS to DSL
 and more. We need the upgrade cycle to continue, which raises important
 questions. Who will push the next round of upgrades and when? How can we ensure
 that we see the network upgrades our innovation economy needs? Now despite the
 significant improvements in US broadband infrastructure, the average speeds that
 Americans actually use appear to lag those in some other countries including
 Korea and Japan. So whether it's because higher speed services here are more
 expensive or for other reasons, Americans aren't adopting high-speed
 services as fast as some of our global competitors. And roughly 30% of Americans
 are still not connected to home broadband at all. In mobile, we face
 additional challenges. US mobile data traffic grew almost 300% last year and
 driven by 4G LTE smartphones and tablets, traffic is projected to grow in
 additional 16-fold by 2016. With this exponential growth, demand for our
 wireless capacity is on pace to exceed supply even with significant new
 spectrum coming online. Congested networks are slower networks. So what can
 our country do to meet these challenges to have a strategic bandwidth
 advantage? We must drive massive private investment in both networks and
 applications, a virtuous cycle where innovative applications drive user
 demand for bandwidth which generates returns and incentives for network
 providers to invest in speed, capacity, and ubiquity which in turn enables
 further innovation, more demand, more network investment, and on we go. Some say
 government has no role to play here. Government should just eliminate
 existing rules and policies on its way out the door. Now someone who spent more
 than a decade in the private sector and believes fundamentally in the power of
 the free market, I disagree with that view. We don't have to choose between
 having broadband policies that drive global leadership and believing in a free
 market. It's a false choice. A smart broadband policy puts a well-functioning
 free market with healthy competition as a core objective. Government has a role
 to play, limited but vital, light touch not no touch. When it comes to promoting
 fast high-capacity and ubiquitous broadband networks there are three key
 areas where the FCC should act. First, we need to keep driving improvements in
 broadband infrastructure and accessibility. We need to continue
 removing barriers to broadband build-out, lowering the cost of infrastructure
 deployment. Spectrum, which the FCC manages, is our invisible infrastructure
 and we need to address the spectrum crunch both by unleashing more airwaves
 for broadband and significantly increasing the efficiency of spectrum
 use by moving forward on sharing and small cell technologies. We're also
 moving forward with a major policy innovation called incentive auctions to
 move spectrum from over-the-air broadcasting to mobile broadband. These
 are all parts of the solution and parts of what government needs to do. And we
 need to continue to implement programs like the Connect America Fund and
 broadband adoption efforts for low-income Americans that will help ensure
 that no one is cut off from the broadband economy wherever they live. Second, we
 need to protect and promote competition. Competition is the lifeblood of our free
 market economy, driving private investment, innovation, and consumer value.
 The more competition the less need for regulation. We know from decades of
 experience that when it comes to competition in the communication sector
 the FCC needs to be a cop on the beat. This means continuing to fairly and
 rigorously review all transactions that come before us, distinguishing between
 efficiency enhancing deals that serve the public interest and should be
 approved without issue and those that threaten harm to competition and
 consumers. It means an obligation to consider all options, divestitures,
 blocking deals, and imposing conditions. And it means vigorously enforcing
 conditions on transactions so companies can't flout or work around their
 obligations. It means that when the data shows that our rules no longer reflect
 the competitive landscape or aren't serving their intended purpose, we need
 to be willing to take a fresh look based on the best data about the state of the
 market and act to preserve competition. Promoting competition also means we need
 to keep a close eye on developments in places like Kansas City to see what
 additional steps federal, state, and local governments can take to encourage
 game-changing investments by disruptive new broadband competitors. We need to
 increase transparency, which helps make markets work more efficiently. And
 although there isn't unanimous agreement on this point and others I've mentioned
 at the FCC, protecting competition sometimes means putting rules in place
 to prevent anti-competitive practices. Rules we adopted last year by majority
 vote to ensure broadband data roaming is one example. Now of course government
 bodies including state and local agencies must do their part to
 encouraging competition and innovation and certainly not erecting roadblocks.
 There's a debate right now in the news here in Washington DC on rules that
 could discourage the innovative on-demand cars car service company Uber.
 Not hard to guess which side I'm on. I'm on the side of innovation. To be clear,
 competition is vital throughout the broadband economy not just for
 communications networks but the Commission focuses primarily on these
 networks. That's where I focused my remarks. And third and related, we need to
 preserve open platforms. It's the Internet's openness and freedom, the
 ability to speak, innovate, and engage in commerce and free enterprise without
 having to ask for anyone's permission that's enabled its unparalleled success.
 It's why we adopted common-sense rules of the road to preserve a free and open
 Internet and to foster the virtuous cycle of massive investment in both edge
 and the core of broadband networks. These rules which we adopted two years ago
 have increased certainty and predictability for innovators and
 investors throughout the space. In fact, in the two years since the FCC adopted
 our open Internet framework, investment has increased, innovation has increased
 throughout the broadband economy at the edge and at the core. We're also fighting
 to protect the Internet as an engine of innovation and free expression
 internationally. In the context of UN negotiations, which will come to a head
 at the end of this year, some countries are proposing to fundamentally change
 the way the Internet works and impose a new layer of international control on
 the free flow of information and data online. These kinds of growth-killing
 proposals must be rejected. So yes, we've made a ton of progress in the United
 States, but the threats and challenges are very real. We can't be satisfied with
 where we are. We have to keep focusing on speed, capacity, and ubiquity and take the
 necessary steps to ensure a strategic bandwidth advantage for the US in the
 21st century. We have to keep looking over our shoulders at what other parts
 of the world are doing and keep asking ourselves the big questions like, is our
 broadband infrastructure providing a strategic bandwidth advantage? Are we
 winning the global bandwidth race? Are we delivering to the country broadband
 performance that's the envy of the world? If we keep the pedal to the floor,
 including through smart government policies, we can ensure we have the
 innovation infrastructure we need to preserve and extend US leadership in the
 global broadband economy. In that world, we all win. Broadband applications and
 service companies, broadband network companies, our economy, and all consumers.
 Working together, we can do this. Thank you.
 This is the transition? This is the transition. So for those of you who are
 watching the live stream, bear with us for probably no more than 90 seconds or
 so while we make a quick stage transition here and we'll be right back.
 Welcome back everyone who's out the live stream. So we only have a short period
 of time but we wanted to make sure that we got to some questions. I'll ask
 something and then Eli is going to ask questions that came directly from the
 audience at The Verge, www.theverge.com if you want to follow along. Chairman, thank
 you. Your speech and vision for broadband and our policy in America is inspired
 and as I think you know coming here, you're preaching not only to the
 converted but to the rabidly converted and so we want to help and I think most
 of the people who are watching on the stream want to help as well. It's an
 election year. It's one of those few opportunities that we as citizens have
 to make a big difference with our vote and our other actions. What we're
 trying to figure out is, at least from my perspective, I hear what you're saying
 and I think gosh it's great for all Americans and you know whether you're a
 Republican or a Democrat your interest is growing our economy and putting
 people to work and taking a leadership position in a growth area. So my question
 is for you is who's against it and what do we do to help persuade those who are
 against it? I'll call them the bad people to frame it in a negative but what
 can we do as citizens who believe in this to advance this agenda? Well let me
 the first point I'd make is that I think the largest enemy is indifference.
 It's not believing that issues around our broadband infrastructure really
 matter to our economy, to education, to health care and indifference is an
 insidious enemy. It's how do you combat indifference? Don't be indifferent and
 what does that mean? I mean what it means get engaged. One of the things that I'm
 proud that we did at the FCC was we really opened it up to input from people
 wherever they are. In the old days if you wanted to have input at the
 FCC you had to hire a lawyer, have them write down some stuff on a filing, file
 it and someone would read it maybe. Everything we do now is live online.
 Everyone on the outside can have input into our proceedings. People can have
 input as individuals whether they're innovators, whether they're people at
 universities etc. They can do it as individuals or they can band together as
 people do and say hey we have a view. That stuff matters. The other thing I'd
 say is ideas matter and we've got some great ideas over the last few years from
 people on the outside who use the channel to say hey listen you've been
 talking about this problem. You know you want to see more innovation hubs in the
 US. Well why don't you think about this. So be engaged and combat indifference is
 I think my main message. I'm gonna ask some questions from our Verge audience.
 I know they didn't pull any punches. They did not pull any punches. The number one question that
 we've gotten, you know the Octagon 5 just came out. It's a big deal.
 Along with it Apple released iOS 6 which for the first time enables you to make
 FaceTime calls over cellular. Now the only major restriction on mobile
 carriers with your open internet rules is that they're not allowed to block
 other voice and video calling services. But AT&T has blocked FaceTime on iOS 6,
 FaceTime over cellular on iOS 6 unless you get a new plan. And the readers they all
 want to know. I mean do you think this is a violation of your open internet rules?
 Are they found a loophole? What's your take? Well this is you know we're gonna
 continue to have disputes and issues that arise under open internet framework.
 This is one that could very well come before us in a formal way so I
 shouldn't comment on specifically. I think there are reports that there may
 be a formal complaint filed. But let me let me make a couple of general points.
 One is the best way to resolve disputes over how the internet should continue to
 roll out is through discussion and multi-stakeholder forums and trying to
 do the thing that the internet has done many times many very successfully. We
 adopted the open internet rules because that doesn't always lead to success and
 sometimes good faith efforts don't resolve things. Many times they do,
 sometimes they don't. I encourage that process. If it doesn't lead to a
 resolution and a complaint is filed we will exercise our responsibilities and
 we will act. Does that mean do you are you okay with AT&T blocking? As I said it
 may come before us as something we have to make a decision. We have obligations
 to make decisions on a record based on input on all the facts. So I just
 can't comment on a specific thing but we're gonna do our job. As we've
 proven in the past and other situations where complaints have come before us and
 we've resolved them we've made the tough decisions. Sure. Okay so the next two
 questions from our readers. It's actually two questions I think it is really one
 question I think it's really interesting. So this one is from C Westfah. Let me ask
 the questions first. Does the FCC intend to start making progress on requiring
 network interoperability, seamless roaming and devices that can be unlocked
 to work in any carrier? The second part of the question is from greasy taco
 aficionado who is one of our one of our best commenters actually. How are Apple's
 competitors supposed to compete when carriers don't allow them to sell the
 same phone design and multiple carriers thereby not getting the brand recognition
 and economies of scale that go along with selling more of a single phone? So a
 couple points. One is you know what we've seen in the mobile marketplace in the
 last four years is probably unlike any business revolution any consumer and
 business revolution that we've ever seen you know in four years to go from a
 world of the feature phones we used to have to iPhones and Android phones and
 to tablets like it's just amazing. Making sure that you know in this world we also
 keep our eye on a couple of balls competition and consumers is important.
 And so issues like interoperability are issues that we look at. There is an issue
 with some competing mobile carriers not being able to access devices. Now that
 issue is less of an issue than it was when the iPhone was first introduced and
 you can get the iPhone and more and more carriers now. Another issue that we
 certainly pay attention to and that we acted on is broadband data roaming. So
 just a very quick story here you know we've there was a an issue that came up
 in the voice era about whether consumers had a right to expect that
 their phones would be able to roam on other networks. This is really important
 for competition because consumers don't want phones that only work some places
 and not other places and there are many challenges to having multiple providers
 build out infrastructure everywhere. So voice roaming rules were in place but
 when I got to the FCC data roaming rules were not and we took that up and we
 looked at it we said you know what it's really the same issue. Consumers expect
 national roaming not all competitors can have the infrastructure and we need to
 adopt these rules to make sure there's broadband data roaming for competitors
 and consumers. I don't understand to this day why that wasn't a unanimous vote
 but it wasn't and we have to keep on working hard to explain why it's needed
 why it's an appropriate role for government how it fosters competition
 protects consumers and ultimately drives the innovation and investment that comes
 from a competitive market. So just to follow up on this from my perspective it
 seems like having slightly more regulation on the network side of things
 enables an enormous amount of competition on the devices and services
 side and that's our company that's this device. Do you share that view? I mean do
 you think there's a room for kind of more regulation interoperability
 standard setting side sort of on the network layer? Well you know we've been
 very focused on exactly the point that you're raising which is how do we ensure
 this vibrant internet-based innovation that we've seen and there's just no
 question that it's really not disputable that the open nature of the internet has
 just played a critical role. You know I watched this company as it was founded
 and so yes you know sometimes government has to act to preserve platforms
 for innovation that's what the open internet net neutrality debate was all
 about. Doing it in a smart market-oriented way that recognizes the
 realities of the marketplace the fact that we really want an open platform for
 innovators and we also really want robust fast networks that require capital
 investment it drives you to policy solutions that recognize the importance
 of both. One of the things I'm proud of is that we were able to do the open
 internet rules in a way that and you know the facts just prove this out over
 the last two years have contributed to this virtual cycle. More innovation more
 demand for consumers more incentive for network companies to invest in wired and
 wireless infrastructure faster speeds more innovation. Part of what I'm saying
 today is that's a great cycle we need to speed it up even more we need more speed
 more capacity and we need to get to ubiquity. Well I think our time is
 unfortunately coming to a close but thank you thank you for your leadership
 thank you for your service thank you for coming here today to share this plan
 with us and I think we all hear the message loud and clear that we have to
 become active if this vision is really going to continue and we can't take for
 granted the foundation that companies like Vox Media and so many other great
 American companies have been built upon so we will fight we'll work together to
 get it done. For those of you who are watching the live stream obviously go to
 FCC.gov to get involved to learn more about what Chairman Genachowski is
 working on and how you can become informed and part of the broadband
 initiatives here and of course please come to the verge.com where Neelai and
 his merry group of commenters will also engage in a lively discussion. Thank you
 everyone who attended thank you everyone who was on the stream have a great day.
 Thanks.