FCC Comr. Copps said Wed. he believed Commission needed to look m...

by ABA International Communications Committee and FCBA International Practice Committee. Copps cited examples of Latin American countries that were using universal access fees to invest in new broadband applications and demonstration projections in rural communities in S. Korea. U.S. doesn’t necessarily need to emulate projects in other countries, he said. “We ought to at least look seriously enough at what they are doing. Are there lessons we can learn?” Copps said: “I don’t think we have the granularity of detail or the data that we ought to have to make all of the broadband decisions that we have before us.” As for communications regulation outreach, FCC already is doing great deal in areas such as “best practices” that can be considered by regulators elsewhere, Copps said, but he would like to see Commission take even more active role in that area. Similarly, Commission already has “commendable record” in regulator-to-regulator meetings between U.S. and other countries. “I would like to see us devote significantly more in the way of resources than we are to that,” Copps said, acknowledging such funding decisions remained in hands of Congress. Where those additional funds would come from “I don’t know but I think we need to make it a priority and I think we need to push and explain to Congress that it is a priority,” he said. Copps also raised questions such as who regulators should be talking to in such bilateral discussions. He asked, for example, whether U.S. should talk only to countries that had independent regulators. “Does this mean you don’t talk to anybody in China? I don’t think so, but we need to have some rules of the road.” Copps will be part of U.S. delegation that attends bilateral discussions with China in Beijing next month, along with NTIA Dir. Nancy Victory and others. Asked if U.S. needed broadband strategy, Copps said Italy and U.S. were only 2 countries in world without one, and Italy had one under development. Each year, FCC puts together Sec. 706 report looking at whether deployment of broadband is proceeding “a reasonable and timely fashion,” he said. “I think somewhat too cavalierly we say things look pretty good, we have now got a subscriber in each zip code. It’s a little like saying if you feed one hungry child in a zip code you solve the problem of hunger. You haven’t really addressed it. We need to be working on it much more systematically than we are.”