Lots of people are wary about the stimulus bill, and on broadband there was a good deal of concern that it would end up simply funding the incumbents to do what they were going to do anyway, without really taking the opportunity to bring in new models of broadband.  But from the current versions: the version the House passed, and the Senate Appropriations Committee released, I'm actually reasonably optimistic.    

The Senate proposal is better along two dimensions.  First, it stands at 9 billion dollars instead of 6 billion dollars, and is to be disposed purely through the National Telecommunications and Information Administration Technology Opportunities Program.  9 billion is not the 44 billion Free Press was arguing for, but it is no chump change, either.  It's about 40% of what Verizon had planned to spend over six years as its investment to shift to FiOS.  Second, it is all to be administered through the NTIA, through a program that was set up during the Clinton Administration to support experimentation and deployment of public and non-profit efforts, and to study public networks; a program that has been starved of funds for half a decade.

By comparison,the House bill appropriates almost half the money for administration by the Secretary of Agriculture, because, as we all know, that is how one gets a coherent national communications policy... or something. The Senate is putting off the political pressure to put it in Agriculture by postponing that decision for negotiations between the Secretaries of Commerce and Agriculture later on, leaving it at the discretion of Commerce to transfer some of the money to Agriculture. The House bill is, however, clearer on the access conditions imposed on those who receive funds. It requires grantees not only to adhere to the minimal net neutrality standards adopted by the FCC's Statement of Principles, but also to run both wired and wireless broadband networks on an "open access basis." The FCC is charged with defining what "open access" means within 45 days of the passage of the Act, but historically (that is, before the Bush-appointed FCC reversed course), open access was the loose term applied to the approach that typified the 1996 Telecommunications Act: that is, competition from new entrants would be the best check on incumbent abuses, and competition would be created by forcing the incumbents to let the new entrants use some pieces of the incumbents' network as leverage to overcome the very high startup costs associated with offering any useful service at all to customers. This broad open access model encompassed a wide range of specifics: from the unbundling requirements applied to the Baby Bells when they had to share their facilities with new entrants to the requirements imposed on Time Warner Cable as a condition of the merger to allow at least three competitors to use their cable plant to provide competing services. But it could also be as minimal as the requirements imposed on the wireless providers who bought some of the 700 MHz channel--that is, allowing anyone to connect any device they wish to to the network.

Now, the FCC will not, within the 45 days Congress gave it to define "open access," revive the whole edifice of the late 1990s access to incumbent networks. But the very fact that open access is again in the air is as clear a sign as any I've seen that the Obama Administration will not give the Bush-appointed FCC's choices on telecommunications policy--specifically, the decision to accept a duopoly market where cable and telephone incumbents are the only serious competitors to each other--any more deference than it has given the policies on much else: be it emissions control waivers, abortion funding for global health programs, or torture. The House bill also adds some explicit important definitions for understanding broadband. It defines "advanced broadband," for which 75% of the money is marked, as 45 Mbps downstream, 15 Mbps downstream. Now, I continue to be baffled about the willingness to formalize asymmetric speeds as the measure, but this is the first time any formal regulatory requirement has even begun to speak in 21st century terms about what counts as broadband. (The requirements from wireless and basic broadband are, as might be expected, lower, but still better than used now by the FCC.) These numbers will almost certainly anchor any future debate over the state of broadband deployment, which, in turn, could also affect the FCC's powers and responsibilities across all its broadband policy, including systems not funded by the stimulus. It also funds the NTIA to build capacity to actually study and benchmark broadband availability and performance, and requires the FCC to issue a broad strategic plan, within a year, for broadband deployment and use in the United States. The Senate bill, although it was stronger on the amount of money and the centralization of responsibility in the NTIA, is weaker and more vague on the access provisions. Still, it gives the NTIA the power to impose on any facilities at least partly funded by the stimulus funds conditions for interconnection and nondiscrimination. This is more vague. "Interconnection" can be interpreted much more narrowly than "open access," and "nondiscrimination" is looser than the direct reference to the FCC's policy. But together with the concentration of the 9 billion dollars in its hands, and the requirement that recipients of the funds do so through partnership with a state or municipality, this power will give the NTIA a much more powerful and interesting regulatory role than it has had in the past, in a context where we might actually see systems built with these funds in fact offer more open systems than those that the incumbents have been trying to build over the last few years. The Senate bill is also the first serious effort to invest in skills training and connecting the availability of physical infrastructure to programs to teach people how to use the systems. An incredibly important, and oft ignored, facet of the problem.

Weaker or stronger, the fact that both the House and Senate bills clearly tie the funding to core goals intended to enhance distributed innovation and open participation, uncontrolled by the incumbents, and to begin to reintroduce the idea that competition from new entrants is important and requires some version of open access and interconnection regulation is a breath of fresh air. Now we have to wait and see the outcome. If the ultimate version looks like the House version in size and division into Agriculture and NTIA, if the minimal speed requirements are watered down, if the open access language and the net neutrality language is no better than the Senate version or worse, we will know that the sausage grinder is working, and it's feeding us a higher proportion of offal and fat over meat than was originally in the mix. If the inverse is true, we may be in for some very interesting times in broadband policy, and a very interesting potential collaboration between the FCC and a suddenly significant NTIA.