00:00I recognize the gentlelady from Washington, Mrs. Perez-Glussenkamp.
00:05Thank you, Chairman, and thank you, Chairman Carr, for being here today.
00:09We were speaking earlier. I know you have young kids.
00:14I'm just curious, how many people in this committee room have a child under three years old?
00:18Reggie?
00:19Child. A child under three.
00:22This is not a representative body, but I will tell you that that is a...
00:27There's a TV channel. We've talked a lot, people talk a lot about Joe Rogan, you know, his shows.
00:32Like, he has 19.8 million followers, or subscribers, on YouTube.
00:37Cocomelon has 193 million.
00:42Let's think about that scale.
00:44And these shows, there's very good data that the attention span,
00:49the self-regulation of a child after watching and spending time watching these programs is devastated.
00:54This is like, teachers are saying that children are coming in less and less able to pay attention and to learn.
01:02We've had a lot of conversations about what is or isn't disinformation,
01:06but, like, at its core, the question is, like, can you pay attention to something?
01:10Can you follow a thread?
01:13Can you learn something worth having?
01:14And these shows are profoundly detrimental to our national health and the long-term independence of our country.
01:23And so, I worry about the regulatory environment and the imbalance between the media that we see online
01:30and the media that you would see in public broadcasting.
01:33And the disadvantage, and how do we get our way out of this?
01:39What are we going to do here?
01:41Yeah, thank you, Congressman, for the question.
01:44As a parent myself of three relatively young kids, 11, 8, and 5,
01:49this is an issue that I've been, you know, very concerned about as a parent
01:51and very focused on the screen time issues and what it does to attention spans.
01:56In terms of the FCC's own regulatory authority, there's a little bit less that we can do there.
02:00But one issue that we have focused on is we have a program that funds connectivity
02:05and tablets, in many cases, for schools.
02:07And there may be steps that the FCC can take there to make sure that there's appropriate procedures
02:12being put in place by the recipients of that funding.
02:16And the way that we rate, like, movies or appropriateness, what is considered appropriate and marketable?
02:24Is there anything we can do there on what is marketable to children?
02:28I think that's a good question.
02:30You know, one issue that Congress is actively debating is updates to sort of child online safety measures.
02:37And when you look at, you know, apps in particular, how do we put better protections in place?
02:41And that's sort of an active debate in Congress.
02:43And I've seen a number of bills on that that I'd be happy to support and happy to sort of work on the issue with you on.
02:48I think it's, you know, it's the question of what is worth having at the end of the day, children who can learn.
02:55Right.
02:56What they choose to learn and not what is fed, you know, to them.
03:01So I wanted to touch also on an issue of rural broadband access.
03:05I get my Internet from a radio tower at home.
03:07A lot of people I know where I live do.
03:09A lot of communities are underserved.
03:11I happen to like, you know, that we have a good thing going with the local provider.
03:16But what, how do we more effectively deploy these dollars?
03:20What is the FCC doing to ensure these processes to build are simplified and accessible to smaller and local providers?
03:28Thank you for the question.
03:29There's a couple things we need to do.
03:31One is we need to continue to streamline our permitting and licensing process, including at the local level where things can slow down.
03:38The federal government has its role to do as well.
03:40It's very difficult to build, particularly on federal lands.
03:43But permitting reform is something that I want to work out at the FCC.
03:46Also, just freeing up more spectrum, as I indicated, our ability to free up spectrum for next generation 5G and 6G has lapsed at the FCC.
03:54But when you can introduce new spectrum, people can get, and this may be what you're getting, is fixed wireless.
04:00So rather than having to have a cable or a fiber provider come to your house, you can get it wirelessly directly from a nearby tower.
04:07We've got over 10 million households that are now on the Internet that way.
04:11And when you get fixed wireless introduced into a community that, for instance, just had cable before, we see something in excess of a 30% reduction in price.
04:20So getting more spectrum out there is important.
04:22The permitting reform is important.
04:24But I also think we need to be technology neutral.
04:26There's a very strong preference in some cases for fiber builds.
04:29I think fiber is a fantastic technology.
04:31I've been in the field.
04:32I've spliced fiber myself.
04:34I think maybe the lion's share of connections should be fiber.
04:36But we need to be open-minded to this next generation of low-Earth orbit satellites, to fixed wireless, to 5G.
04:42I think when we make sure that all of those tools are available, we can bridge the digital divide faster and in a more cost-effective way.
04:50And what is your view on, you know, when we have these public resources, things that are supposed to be owned and in service to the public,
04:56how do we ensure in the long run that these systems can be owned and operated locally?
05:02Well, ultimately, part of this debate is there's broad agreement on the importance and value of an Internet connection.
05:08And to some extent, then, the debate breaks two ways.
05:11On the one hand, you can say it's so important that we have to regulate it like a utility because we want to have it.
05:16The challenge with that is when it comes to something like the Internet that's so dynamic where we need billions and billions of dollars being invested repeatedly on quick cycles,
05:24utility-style regulation is the wrong direction for that, in my view.
05:28So we need to have this light regulatory framework that incentivizes billions and billions of dollars to go into it.
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