BEAD, USF Reform and Space Among FCC and NTIA Priorities: Leadership

The Colorado event also saw antitrust experts bemoaning the politicization of antitrust enforcement, squeezing out economic expertise. They said the Trump administration, like the Biden administration before it, has a populist antitrust stance against Big Business. The TPI event also saw speakers discussing issues ranging from AI's power needs to 6G.

Cassady said NTIA’s particular BEAD focus is on agency processes and dealing with a flood of final proposals coming soon from states. “We are heads-down on that right now,” he said. Cassady indicated states shouldn’t expect rubber-stamp approvals of their final proposals. While NTIA is disposed to work with states, it also “retains some oversight.”

Delacourt said USF contribution reform is a Carr priority and will be “on the agenda in the near future” without elaborating.

While the FCC is working on an AWS-3 reauction and an auction of 100 MHz of the C band, that won't be enough to fulfill the 800 MHz spectrum auction pipeline required by the revised budget reconciliation package, previously known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Delacourt said. That necessitates looking at other bands, such as the citizens broadband radio service, he added. Cassady said NTIA wants to focus on ways of “possibilizing” commercialization of spectrum, such as seeing where compression is available.

In addition, Cassady said space policy reform has been a big area of focus for the FCC, and NTIA “will take some inspiration” from it. Small commercial space operators are often frustrated by the difficulty of getting regulatory approvals, and NTIA can try to address that with space regulatory agencies, he said.

FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez said the Carr FCC is in an unenviable position of having to find 800 MHz. She talked up the potential of spectrum sharing over removing incumbents to allow new uses of bands.

Gomez called for the agency to restart its paused cyber trust mark program. She said it’s “a really good example” of a market-driven approach. She said if there are legitimate concerns about possible Chinese influence on the program, those concerns can be mitigated.

Asked about possible changes to the FCC's broadcast ownership rules, Gomez said it’s important to continue to uphold the agency’s pillars of media policies -- competition, viewpoint diversity and localism. “I’m very much aware the business has changed significantly,” she said. The agency needs to keep in mind that media markets can differ substantially from one another, and it needs to avoid ending up with "nationalized, whitewashed journalism.”

Former FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington said the U.S. needs “telecom sovereignty.” The country is hurting from the lack of a national-level champion or a sovereign technology package to offer to allies, Simington said: if the U.S. offers no alternative to Chinese industrial telecom offerings, “then China will win.” The U.S. has been overly focused on consumer 5G, even as no killer application has emerged, he added. China’s commercial 5G industry is huge, and the U.S. must “get real” about growing that opportunity or else it will cede that area to international competition.

Cassady said NTIA is “taking a close look at everything” involved with China hosting the 2027 World Radiocommunication Conference, including concerns around a large U.S. delegation attending. Added Delacourt, “security issues loom large,” though that’s mostly a diplomatic issue and thus the purview of the State Department.

Antitrust

Christopher Yoo, founding director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Technology, Innovation & Competition, said the big flow of M&A expected under Trump hasn't materialized as there’s still uncertainty about the White House's merger preferences. Carl Shapiro, economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said the Biden administration left a “very sad” antitrust legacy because the Biden approach was built on a false narrative that there were decades of lax antitrust enforcement leading to large market concentrations. The data doesn’t bear that out, Shapiro argued. Georgetown University law professor Howard Shelanski said it’s likely there will be more attention under the Trump administration on firm conduct than on policing mergers, which could hurt competition.

Shelanski said the administration’s populist suspicion of big corporations is potentially moderated by its pro-business voices. The Biden administration didn’t have such a counterpoint, he said.

Shapiro, a former deputy assistant attorney general for economics in the DOJ's antitrust division, said when he served there during the Obama administration, he saw no evidence of pressure from the White House. Such norms “aren’t doing so well these days,” he said. The next few years will see an “open-for-business” stance toward antitrust where lobbyists have big sway.

AI

Improving living standards depends largely on new ideas, but ideas are getting more expensive, Stanford economics professor Chad Jones said. For example, researchers have learned that it takes ever-greater R&D resources to maintain computer processor improvements, Jones said, adding that R&D and content creation are claiming an ever-greater portion of GDP.

Beyond that, U.S. educational attainment is leveling out as high school and college graduation rates have plateaued, and population growth globally is slowing, Jones said.

However, AI is already leading to productivity boosts in areas like software and coding. Over the next 25 years it could mean billions of virtual research assistants that invent new ideas in other areas, resulting in better chips, robots, medical technologies and so on, he said. However, he added, AI represents the next generation of automation, and automation trends of the past 150 years haven't sped up economic growth. Indeed, innovations like engines, semiconductors and the internet may be what have kept growth from moving slower than the 2% U.S. GDP growth per person the nation has averaged for decades.

Google head of energy and sustainability policy Marsden Hanna said there's a mismatch between the pace of AI power demands and that of power grid infrastructure construction in the U.S. It could take 11 years to permit an interstate transmission line, while the nation's electricity transmission infrastructure is expected to see a 15% growth over the next five years, driven in part by AI use, he said. Tanya Das, Bipartisan Policy Center director of artificial intelligence and energy technology policy, said that while data centers won't represent a huge driver in U.S. power demands in coming years, they tend to cluster in particular parts of the U.S., such as Virginia and Texas. Das said there's no clear evidence so far that data centers are driving up power costs for consumers, though that's a major debate among state regulators.

Aspen Forum Notebook

The U.S. government has done a good job via the National Institute of Standards and Technology of laying out the need to move to a post-quantum cryptography to protect online traffic, but it needs to do more messaging about its importance, quantum computing experts said. Quantum computing remains at the prototype stage, with the technology under development seen to be useful in such applications as scientific simulations and modeling, said Elizabeth Rossi, who works on governance strategies for Google Quantum AI. However, quantum computing also could be good at defeating encryption, said Edward Parker, a physical scientist at Rand Corp. Rossi said it’s important to move to post-quantum cryptography now, as bad actors could use quantum computing in five or 10 years to decrypt data they are harvesting today through online hacks.

Speaking Sunday, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser (D) said he saw an increased influence of lobbyists replacing rule of law. As such, he warned against normalization of policy decisions made specifically to benefit an influential party. Changes are needed to bolster the rule of law, as occurred after the Watergate scandal. He criticized FCC merger reviews, such as those involving T-Mobile and Paramount Global, for straying from issues core to the purchase and getting into the anti-diversity, equity and inclusion agenda of agency Chairman Brendan Carr.