FIRSTS Conversation with the First African-American FCC Chair

JR: Before we get started, I wanted to set the stage.

Now, as many of you might know, we’ve been holding a series of conversations. As you may have heard, I am, in fact, the first woman confirmed to run the Federal Communications Commission, and you can look it up; it’s true.  But listen, Mignon Clyburn put a huge crack in that glass ceiling when she did a terrific job as acting Chairwoman back in 2013.  And maybe you don’t know this, but back in 1948, Frieda Hennock became the FCC’s first female Commissioner.

So, here’s the point: for every one of these historic “firsts” there are always people who came before them, who cleared the path and made it easier for others to follow and go even farther.  So, that’s the virtuous cycle.  So, we decided that we would launch what we are calling “Firsts Conversations,” find people who opened doors, led the way, and were trailblazers in one form or another.

Alight!  So, once we settled on this theme, we had a really easy time choosing our first guest, like really easy and that’s Bill Kennard.  He was the first African American to serve as FCC Chairman, and that was from 1997 to 2001.  And it’s just one chapter in a really remarkable career because he would later go on to serve as U.S. Ambassador to the European Union and also in positions in really the highest levels of corporate America.

So, let’s give a warm welcome to our old FCC friend.

[APPLAUSE]

BK: Thank you. Thank you.

JR: Alight, well thank you for joining us.  This audience knows that you are the former Chairman of the FCC, but what they might not know is that you didn’t grow up in Washington.

BK: I did not.

JR: You grew up in Hollywood.  So, we are going need the backstory.  What was it like growing up in Hollywood, and how did you make your way to Washington?

BK: Well, before I answer that question, I want to thank you for inviting me back. So, Hollywood to Washington.  You know people say that D.C. is Hollywood for lawyers. So, when I became a lawyer, this was kind of a logical place for me to come, but seriously, I got interested in college in the intersection between policy and law, and technology.  And it was all pre-internet. So, this was before telecom policy was cool.

JR: I appreciate that you are convinced that it was cool.

BK: Me and two other people in my university. So, once I decided I wanted to do something in that area, D.C. was the logical place to come.  That’s how I ended up here.

JR: So, when you were at the FCC, looking back at the timing, I wasn’t just the new millennium, but it was really the start of the internet age and the early days of the mobile revolution.  So, look back, and tell me what were the biggest things you got right about those issues and that moment.

BK: Well, it was a very different time.  When I arrived at the FCC, we still had rotary dial telephone, and no one had a cellphone.

JR: The ones around the world?  Wow.

BK: Absolutely, I got my first cellphone in life issued to me here at the FCC.  Did my first emails at the FCC.  But it was also an important time because it was the beginning of the internet, wireless phones, and as the first African American Chair, I felt a special obligation to make sure that this wonderful technology that people were discovering for the first time would be available to everyone, and in crafting my agenda at that time, I made a point of making sure that we would reach out to people who are most at risk for being stranded on the wrong side of the digital divide.  In fact, it was our administration that coined the term.  Digital divide was actually coined by Larry Irving who was then, head of NTIA. So, a lot of the things we did were to reach out to those communities, and I felt it was important as Chair, to institutionalize those relationships.  So, we set up the Disabilities Rights Office, for example.  We formally recognized travel governments who were very much at risk, still are frankly, of being stranded on the wrong side of the digital divide.  And lot of our policies, like the E-Rate, for example, were crafted to bring technology to everyone around the country, and it's still a challenge you are fighting obviously, and I think you have a huge opportunity to accelerate some of the work that we started.

JR: Ok, so I asked you what you got right.  So, you know what the next question is.  We’ll say, what were the things you got wrong, or you might have done differently.  And you don't have to give specifics.  Maybe it's more like what do you wish you knew back then that you know now?

BK: Well, it's a very fair question.  When I got the job, I had a long wait to be confirmed, and I used that time to reach out to every living former FCC Chair, and I had really interesting, fun meetings with all of my predecessors.  And one theme that emerged from all of these conversations was that a number of them, they wished they had been bolder and that they had taken more risks in the job.  And so, then looking back, although I am proud of the things we accomplished, I wish that I could have done more particularly to bring technology to people who are still struggling today to get access to it.  So, that said, you feel good about what you're done, but think back sometimes and say ‘Gee, you know, we could have done more if we had maybe pushed a little harder.’

JR: So, you had a front row seat really in the early days of internet history.  So, I wondered, do you have any great chapters or stories to tell about early internet history that affected you or the FCC or things you saw up close?

BK: There were a lot really fun and interesting, harrowing experiences. E-Rate is an interesting story because it’s been around for over 20 years, and we take for granted its importance.  And people on both sides of the aisle talk about its importance. But it almost didn’t happen.  It was written into the Telecommunications Act of 1996 as you all know.  It was championed by Al Gore and Bill Clinton, and it fell to the FCC that I was privileged to chair to implement it.  But it didn’t have bipartisan support. In fact, it virtually had no bipartisan support. And when I proposed that we were going to implement the E-Rate and invest two billion dollars a year because that’s what we thought would be necessary to connect the schools and libraries in the country. We had some very difficult hearings, and that resulted in a letter.

I got a letter from the chairs and ranking members of both the House and Senate Commerce Committee telling me, in effect, kill the program.  Don’t do it. Don’t implement it.  Just wait, and that was followed-up with the phone call John Dingle, who was then the longest serving member of Congress, very powerful former Chair of the Commerce Committee.  And I’ll never forget this phone call. He called me up, and he said did you get my letter?  And I said yes, I did and then I proceeded in sort of a very lawyerly fashion to tell him why I thought that the legislation required that we implement the E-Rate in the way we had proposed. And he said, ‘No, no you don’t understand.’  He said, ‘look, if you proceed with this, I’m going to destroy you, personally and professionally.’

JR: He said it, just like that?

BK: That’s the exact quote.

JR: Ooo!

BK: I’m going destroy you personally and professionally.  So, I’m, you know, the brand-new chairman of the FCC, and that was not a happy day.

[LAUGHTER]

And I thought, long and hard about it obviously, but we decided that we would go ahead.  We would push forward.  But it was in many ways, my political education as the Chair because I knew that the only way we could get this program off the ground is to reach out and build a coalition of support for it.  And that’s what we did, and we got public education groups and private schools, colloquial schools, and civil rights leaders.  And when we voted to implement the E-Rate in the Commission meeting room, 22 members of the black caucus showed up to support that decision.  I don’t think that’s ever happened before where we had that many members of Congress come to the FCC.  They came down from Capitol Hill, sat in a meeting room, and gave us a standing ovation after we voted those rules.

So, two lessons from that experience.  One is, at the dawn of the Internet Age, there wasn’t a coalition to support efforts to bridge the digital divide.  We had to create it. We had to reach out and bring these people together.  Now, I had support from the Clinton Administration.  So, I wasn’t doing it by myself, but it was a big effort. And the second thing I learned from that is that if you want to accomplish things in this job, you often have to reach outside of DC. because when you have this job, and you and I have talked about this, that this town tries to keep you in a box, right; they try to put you in a box and define your successes, you know, your relationships with other commissioners, and with the hill, and with lobbyist who come in.  It ain't about that, right? It's about ultimately what you do to help people who have never heard of the FCC, who live all around the country.  And, you know, now over 20 years later when I think back on my time here, the things I’m most proud of are the things we did for those folks, right?  And it's very hard because this town is sort of designed not to allow you do that.

JR: Well, that’s beautifully said.  So, now let me follow-up with a semi-mundane question.  So, you were the general counsel of the FCC?

BK: Yes.

JR: So, you were staff at the FCC?

BK: Yes, I was.

JR: And then eventually became its chairman.  So, tell us, how did that affect your approach.

BK: Well, it helped, and it hurt, quite frankly. It helped in that I really knew the FCC.  I knew a lot of people.  I had practice law before the FCC for many years.  I knew how the place worked, and I was general counsel to Reed Hundt, and I used to watch him be Chair, and I thought I can do that.  You know,  it’s not so hard.

[LAUGHTER]

I would've done it differently.

BK: But it looks easy from the outside, you know how this is.

JR: This is very familiar.

BK: Yes.  And I found the transition harder than I thought it would be quite frankly.  Moving from advisor to decision maker was more difficult for me than I thought it would be.  I remember an instance when, early in my tenure, we had a big meeting we were going to decide a big issue.  I don’t even what it was, but staff were making all their recommendations of pros and cons of things and then everyone stop talking and they looked at me, and I thought to myself, do you expect me to make a decision?

[LAUGHTER]

And it was awkward, and I felt like my team looked at me and said, ‘Gee he’s still kind of a rookie’ because I froze and after that I decided on any big decision, I would hear the recommendations and pros and cons and then I would tell the team ‘Ok, let me sleep on it and I'll come back to you.’  Because when you own the decision, it's personal in a different way than when you're the advisor.  And after that I would always usually get together with Michelle Ellison and my Chief of Staff, and we'd have a little come a to Jesus’ meeting where we would make the decision, and then I could be more resolute the next time, So, you know it's learning leadership and for me it was a transition.  It took me a while.

JR: Well, that feels familiar.  All right, you mentioned this earlier that really the coining of the term digital divide happened under your tenure by Larry Irving, and here we are decades later.  We're still talking about it.  It's such a potent concept, and yet one of those issues we continue to struggle with.

BK: Yes.

JR: So, what do you think is the key is to actually bridging that divide. What can we do right now to really close at once and for all?

BK: We just have to continue working at it.  There is, I think, a fallacy that we will just fix the problem, and everyone will be connected, and it will be fine.  That’s not the way it works in my view because the networks are always evolving, and the networks become more complicated and to deliver cutting edge broadband today takes different kinds of investments.  We have to invest in the middle mile.  We have to invest in transport and backhaul and edge computing and cloud storage and things that are expensive and hard to do.  And so, they'll always be market failures, places in the country that the market just does not find it economically feasible to serve and that's where government has to step and will always have to do that. I think you have a tremendous opportunity now because of the infrastructure funding, which is a historic amount of money that's being devoted to solving this problem and you'll be able to accelerate in ways that will be pretty historic but that won't solve the problem.  It’ll close the gap, but we’ll have more work to do.

JR: It’s feels to me like something we are always going to be working on.

BK: Correct.

JR: So, you mentioned E-Rate a moment ago, and that's a program that's near and dear to me as I work for many years for Senator Rockefeller, claimed responsibility for it, despite the stories told.

BK: He was critical.

JR: Where do you think we stand now with education technology?  We are making such strides connecting schools and classrooms, but where do you think we stand now?

BK: Well, we saw during the pandemic seeing 17 million school children unable to get access to broadband, and we saw the Homework Gap which, I think, is a term that you coined, if I'm not mistaken.

JR: It is pre-pandemic.

BK: Yes, And so obviously we still have problems. My own view having been involved in this issue for a long time is that in order to make more progress we have to think less about just getting broadband and higher speeds into schools and communities and think more holistically about how kids use broadband to learn. They need a safe place where they can go. They need, they need a good curriculum, software. They need mentors to teach them how to use digital tools. And too often we think of it as just let's just get more bandwidth to schools. That doesn't really solve the problem. So, I'd like to see us partner more with educators to be more holistic in our solutions.

JR: All right one of the things when I was looking back on your tenure that you did is you started a development initiative.

BK: Hmmm.

JR: Which I thought was really interesting about how we could help with the growth of the tech sector in other countries, this was a form of international outreach that was different than what’d come before.

BK: Yes.

JR: So, I want you to tell me a little bit about what informed you're thinking to set that up and what was it like and what you believed you were able to accomplish.

BK: It was at a time when we had just passed the 96 Act, and we believed fervently in this country that in order to promote free and open free flow of information, we needed to deregulate the telecom sector and that required strong independent regulation from independent regulators, and we wanted to bring this on the road if you will.  Obviously, the free flow of information which is essential to democracy.  But there's also there's a tension there because a lot of autocratic regimes, undemocratic places are threatened by that, and we thought that if we could kind of hold out the carrot of economic development then the free flow of information might follow, and we had some successes.  We are we helped a lot of emerging regulatory, in new independent regulatory agencies get started, and we would send teams mainly from the international bureau to help them, and I thought it was very satisfying work, I know, for me and for the FCC staff as well, and I think we did make a difference.

JR: So, keeping with the theme of international and global work, you were the U.S. ambassador to the European Union.  So, tell us about that job and, if anything you did at the FCC, including that development initiative, helped prepare you for it.

BK: It definitely did. As FCC Chair, I had the opportunity to do some things with the European Commission. So, I got to know how the EU works a little bit, and it is a far more complicated bureaucracy than even we deal with.

JR: Complicated doesn't begin to describe it, yes.

BK: It’s unbelievable.  You know, I thought well if I can be successful in Washington, you know, I can go to the EU. It’s Washington on steroids in terms of its complexity.  But it was a fun job.  It was great and having some familiarity with technology really helped me because the EU at the time had a lot of important e-commerce initiatives, digital initiatives and they welcomed me in the room because of my background here and they allowed me to engage in a way most ambassadors are not able to and then we had also had a lot of technology issues with the EU.  We had some like the perennial privacy issues with the EU, and we also had some very sensitive national security issues involving the sharing of passenger record data on airplanes and trying to disrupt the way terrorists finance their networks.  So, it was satisfying for me because when you are an ambassador, your thrown literally thousands of issues and you have your experts in your embassy and the state department but you’re half an inch deep.  So, it's just fun to have a couple issues where I could dive in, and I knew something about it and could speak with authority.  It was fun.

JR: Alright.  So, you've served now at the highest levels of government and the private sector.  So, what's one thing that you wish the government knew or better understood about the private industry and then vice versa what's one thing you wish that private industry better understood about government?

BK: Well, I think the people in government often don't appreciate the fact that in business it's really not all about profit and maximizing share price and EBITA and all those things.  It's important.  You know, and the companies can't survive if they don't pay attention to that.  But I’ve been involved with a lot of telecom companies over the years as an investor and board member, and they really do care about a lot of issues we care about—about bridging the digital, and their investors care about it.  There's a huge movement among institutional investors to push corporations to do more on these issues. It’s called ESG—environmental social governance.  It’s real and people in corporations do take pride and their corporate purpose and in this sector of their corporate purpose is serving customers and bringing more people online, and so they do care.  And on the flip side of it, I do think that people in business not all of them but too many of them feel that people in government are just not as good; they don't work as hard; they take too long to do things, and I always try to correct them because working here and I tell people this.  I tell them many times over the years that I work with the most brilliant and talented people at the FCC in my career and it's really and I'm not saying that just to suck up to the crowd.

JR: But you can go ahead! Go ahead, continue!

[LAUGHTER]

BK: A lot of people in business think well if that's the truth and you know why don't they just go to the private sector and make more money.  They don't always understand the people come here because they want to serve a higher purpose. And I always tell people who have left government and gone to the private sector that they have an obligation to correct these pejoratives about government service because it's really harmful, and it seeps into our political dialogue—people beating up on government. It’s not so much the case in Europe, I found. Government officials are held in higher regard.

JR: Why do you think that is?

BK: I don't know.  I think it’s in part because government service is considered a very prestigious career, at least in Europe where I served.  And people who pursue that career, they garner more respect, and it's sad when you come back here and there's all this bashing of government, which is unfortunate. Yeah

JR: It’s phenomenal how hard people in this agency work and how deeply they care 
about the public interest.

BK: Yes!  And I wish I could sing or scream that from the rooftops every day so if you walk into corporate settings and do that, that's a good second.

JR: Alright!  So, your résumé is just chalk filled of success stories, but you know, failure happens.  Sometimes, we don't talk about it, and failure happens to a lot of successful people too. So, you don't have to be specific but tell me a little bit about failure and what you might have learned from it over time.

BK: I didn't put the failures on the résumé.

[LAUGHTER]

BK: But I've had some. You know what I’ve learned is that you learn a lot more from your failures than your successes, unquestionably.  Which is not to say that you should look for failure in your career.  Put it this way, if you're managing your career so that you avoid failure  or getting close to failure you are not pushing yourself enough.  Mario Andretti's famous race driver used to say that people would ask him well why are you so good at what you do.  And he said, ‘Well when you're in the race car when you're on the track and if you feel like you're in full control, you’re not going fast enough.’ And the same can be said for your career, right?  You got it push yourself outside you're your comfort zone a little bit. I've made a lot of job changes in my life and there's always this moment including when I had your job, when I’ve looked failure in the face.  When John Dingle called me up that day, and you know I said ‘gee, I may not be cut out for this.  I may not be able to make it.  When members of across the aisle issued statement saying the chairman the FCC should resign then you think deeply, you know, maybe I'm not cut out for this, but you regroup, and you learn from that, and you move on.

JR: So, you've been thinking about technology really since the dawn of dial-up and there's so much in our culture right now that leaves people so concerned about technology and its power over our lives, but I want to go to the other side of the coin and ask you what makes you optimistic about technology?

BK: Oh, gosh!  This is the most exciting time, it really is.  We’ve seeing a lot of change over the course of my career, you know. I walked in this agency pre-internet and look where we are today.  But that pace of change will pale in comparison to what next, even over the next decade.  It's the marriage of artificial intelligence and much faster low latency high bandwidth networks that are fundamentally changing the way we're going to live.  I'll just give you an example—robotics.  I serve on the board of an automobile company, Ford Motor Company, and so I get glimpses into what's happening, what will happen in the future transportation. We are about 10 years away from deployment pretty ubiquitously of autonomous vehicles.

JR: 10 years?

BK: 10 years.

JR: We might hold you to it.

BK: It's coming.  It's already in China;  they're ahead of us in this regard.  We’ll have an environment where your car will know when it needs to be repaired. Without your own intervention as the car owner, it will schedule an appointment with the dealer; it'll drive itself to the dealer, get repaired and drive itself back.  This is coming.

JR: Ok, now you're talking.

[LAUGHTER]

JR: I got a lot check engine light on lately.

BK: There you go. There you go.

JR: If it wants to take care of business itself, I’m all in.

BK: No, it’s going to be a pretty phenomenal, drone technology, robotics, it's going to change the world. We already see it in our lives with machine learning.  How many of you are on streaming music platforms, Spotify, Pandora, right?  You know, this is remarkable!  These devices tell you what you want to listen to based on your what you've already listen to.  It’s machine learning, and it's affecting our lives in pretty profound ways.

JR: Any other areas of technology you think we're going to have extraordinary impact in the next 10 years?

BK: Healthcare.  I mean the merger of quantum computing, the ability to crunch massive amounts of data, is going to make incredible strides in healthcare. We are already seeing some of it.  But the challenge for folks here is that how do we keep up with it right you know you is regulators things are happening so fast. It’s always a challenge for us to keep up in government. Did I just say for us to keep up in government? Going native here again.

[LAUGHTER]

BK: But, the challenges are pretty daunting as regulators.

JR: Anything I have an asked you?

BK: I think you’ve covered it pretty well.

JR: Ok, so we're going end with like a lightning round.

BK: Ok.

JR: So, I am a fan of that.  This is the first of our “First Conversations” series, so I'm going to ask you a little bit about some firsts.  So, what's the first thing you do when you get up every morning?

BK: I have a little routine in the morning.  I meditate; I do some deep breathing; I take my pulse; I think about the day, yesterday, tomorrow; set my priorities.  It’s an important time for me, first thing in the morning, I don't rush into my day.

[LAUGHTER]

JR: That calm sounds really good to me, so.  Alright, what was your first concert?

BK: Stevie Wonder.  I'm huge fan, huge fan and in fact when I became Chair of the FCC, I invited him here and he came, and he talked in the commission meeting room.  You can meet really cool people in this job.

JR: I met him in this job too because he has been a nonstop advocate for using technology for disabilities access.

BK: I didn't realize that.

JR: And now here's too much information for me, but when I worked in the Senate on the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, which updated the Americans with Disabilities Act, I worked some long hours, and the administration was kind enough to invite me to the signing ceremony with the President.  So, I go into the gold room at the White House which is all chandeliers and drapes, and I find my seat in the last row of the very last seat.  And before I went there, had to write a memo to my boss Senator Rockefeller, and you know what memos look like; they’re like substantive, but then there's a little bit of like with the rooms going to be like.  And Senator Rockefeller was a great Bach fan and would recommend Bach to me all the time and my knowledge extends to the Brandenburg Concertos and no further.  But in any event, I had to write to him that he be standing next to Stevie Wonder with the full explanation of who Stevie Wonder was and a full recommendation and that he look up a “Sir Duke” and “Sign Sealed Delivered,” in case he was interested.

BK: That’s a cool story.

JR: Stevie Wonder has been at the FCC multiple times advocating for the disabilities access.

BK: I didn’t realize that.  That’s wonderful.

JR: Alright back to—what’s one bit of advice to give to a young person who's on their first day of their first big job?

BK: Just know that your first job won't be your last and as someone who's made a lot of job changes in life, I always advise young people to do different things in life and when you get a job you got to have a sense of what do I want to get out of it that will prepare me for the next one.

JR: That’s good advice.  Alright, final question—tell us about a person who helped you become a first.

BK: There is a lot of them.  I would say first and foremost my parents.  None of this would've been possible without them. In a broader more macro sense it's all of the people who fight and marched and died to make it possible for me to become the first African American Chair of the FCC, and, you know, those people lifted me up and got me here. And they kept me afloat once I got here, and I stand on their shoulders. Many of the things I did as chair, was in recognition of that. And I know you feel the same way; I've heard you talk about this, and I know you'll do great things for as Chair of this this agency, and I look forward to supporting you in any way I can.

JR: Thank you so much!  Appreciate you being here and appreciate that you have a rightful role in history associated with it this agency and the work that it did.

BK: Thank you.

JR: Thank you so much.