Genachowski's Opening an iPhone Library
BY Nancy Scola | Friday, March 5 2010
Credit: Here's KateWired's Steven Levy has a useful interview with FCC chair Julius Genachowski that serves as a good primer on what the Commission is thinking as it enters the final weeks before its national broadband plan is due. (The strategic plan, required under the stimulus bill, is slated to be Obama's desk by March 17th -- after the FCC got a one-month extension from Congress.) As the interview makes clear, it's worth keeping in mind that Genachowski's task is, in some ways, as much overhauling the Federal Communications Commission itself -- or rebooting it, if you will -- to make it into a modern, responsive agency as it to draft some elegant policy for connecting America with high-speed Internet. To wit:
[O]ne challenge is that we need all the staffers who work on all of these hard issues to have firsthand familiarity with cutting edge devices and technologies. So we are working on setting up a technology lending library here at the FCC where people on the staff would be able to come in and say, “Look, I can’t afford an iPhone or a netbook, but let me borrow it for a month.”
Think about it. This is the agency that, in the United States of America, is charged with regulating equipment that its experts can't get their hands on. How often do you think AT&T has to scramble to get access to FCC briefing books? Not all that often. As a personal aside, it strikes me that when people who have spent time in the corporate world, or even a reasonably well-functioning non-profit or university, think about the challenges and degradations of government service, they're still thinking of it too glamorously. Remember when on 30 Rock Alec Baldwin goes to DC and (IIRC) it rains on him in his office? Yeah, like that.
Anyway, the whole interview is a good read.