The torrents of spring are up upon Bill Kennard.
Kennard, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission for all of four months, stands at the vortex of an historical transformation of the telecommunications industry, whose powerful forces, the Democratic Clinton appointee is finding, are nearly as violent and unforgiving as the deadly winds of destruction that flattened parts of Alabama last week.
What many people in official Washington haven’t realized yet is that he is up to the task. Kennard, whose 41-year-old looks combine the reflective introspection of a young James Baldwin and the quiet, handsome determination of a youthful Julian Bond, new chairman of the NAACP, is here to stay.
Some mistake his genial, easygoing manner for weakness. When he’s not putting in 14 hour days at the FCC, he gets reacquainted with his wife, Deborah Kennedy, managing counsel at Mobile Corp. And with any time left over, he wets a line and goes fishing. But that’s it. He said there’s no time to even jog a couple miles anymore.
A pushover, he is not. A fighter, with a belief in the system and a desire to use it for public good, he is.
Kennard had a solid grounding in family and social values. He alludes to both often in speeches about the three C’s: competition, community and common sense. Kennard in 1995 lost his father, an early role model who overcame racial discrimination to establish the largest African American architectural firm in Los Angeles.
Kennard is often referred to the first African American FCC chairman. While that is true, the fact that Kennard is an FCC chairman who happens to be black is just as significant. He is qualified.
That Kennard feels strongly about diversity in telecommunications comes with the package.
For all that, Kennard can expect to be beaten up badly and suffer much during his five-year tenure. Not because he’s black, but because he’s Bill Kennard.
Already, the FCC chief is getting an earful from the GOP-led Congress about auctions, bankruptcies, FCC relocation and the implementation of the 1996 telecom act, a massive legislative project that was designed to fuel competition through thoughtful deregulation but instead has led to billion-dollar megamergers and unprecedented consolidation.
Baby Bells, which control the $100 billion local telco market, are angry Kennard hasn’t let them into the $90 billion long-distance market yet. No wonder Bells haven’t loosened their grip on local bottlenecks, if you believe the Justice Department and the FCC.
The wireless industry has questioned Kennard’s leadership on antenna siting, universal service, E911, and other issues because he refuses to rubber stamp their regulatory wish list. The private wireless industry will have to convince him there is more to wireless policy than auctions.
“Pre-emption should be the last resort,” said Kennard in an interview with RCR.
“We haven’t seen situations yet where pre-emption is called for,” Kennard stated. “My advice to the industry is work with local governments. Try to empathize and put yourself in their shoes, particularly small communities that don’t have the resources necessarily to understand the federal law and the local zoning rules.”
At the same time, Kennard said he has not ruled out pre-emption on a case-by-case basis. “Pre-emption can be a dangerous tool if it’s done on a very broad-based sweeping way because it is an issue of federal vs. state and local jurisdiction.”
While he owes his job to his cantankerous mentor and predecessor, Reed Hundt, Kennard has shown he’s far from being an ideological clone.
In addition to differing with Hundt on antenna-siting policy, Kennard said he does not believe a market-driven, flexible spectrum policy is necessary or even desirable.
Kennard has been under siege for weeks by Republicans, Democrats and even former colleagues at the National Association of Broadcasters for being a good soldier of the Clinton-Gore camp.
One could rightly conclude that Kennard was set up-unwittingly or purposefully-by an administration willing to let the 41-year-old native Californian get pummeled over issues it knew it couldn’t win in the short run but that might have a longer-term, self-serving political payoff.
First, Clinton, in his State of the Union message, telegraphed his desire for the FCC to mandate free airtime for political candidates to alleviate the money-chase at the core of the current Democratic fund-raising scandal.
Since Democrats are less efficient fund raisers than Republicans, this proposal helps the likely Democratic presidential nominee in 2000 at the expense of the GOP. The big beneficiary: Vice President Gore.
Second, Kennard picked up the crusade of Hundt (Clinton, Hundt and Kennard are Yale graduates) to wire all schools, libraries and rural health-care facilities by 2000 as part a new, enlightened universal service paradigm.
The problem is, according to critics like Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.), Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) and others, the FCC doesn’t have a good handle on the accounting aspect of a new, evolving universal service program whose first responsibility historically has been to low-income and rural-based citizens.
So why the emphasis and mad rush to connect schools, libraries and hospitals to the Internet by 2000? Stevens and others have a one-word answer: Gore. It is a pet project of the vice president that would sell nicely on the campaign trail.
How is Kennard handling the barrage of criticism from the left and right? With a calm, cool demeanor. In the midst of patronizing lectures and high-pitched warnings at House and Senate appropriations hearings recently, Kennard took the heat gracefully and stood his ground defiantly.
“I saw up close and personal (as former FCC general counsel) not only the way the act came into being, but also how deeply members of Congress care about this act and its implementation,” said Kennard. “It is a monumental task we’ve embarked on here to rewrite the whole regulatory landscape that governs this area. Whenever you have a lot of change, it creates a lot of anxiety.”
Not only is he not unnerved about all the commotion over the transition from monopoly regulation to competition in telecom, he sees it as a positive sign that policy is headed in the right direction.
“I tend to be sort of an optimist about things,” said Kennard. “I sort of think it’s a good thing, because the fact that there is so much anxiety out there-not only among people in Congress but in industry and courts-it means things are changing. What we’ve known as the status quo for a long time is fundamentally being restructured.
“We’ve got to take the long view on this and realize that years hence we will look back at this period and it will be a historical period in telecommunications law and policy.”
It will be called the Kennard years.
