Contents
Background and Copyright Notice The Golden Age of FCC Regulation Pulling Iowa Into the Information Age	Imagination: The Essential Ingredient The Best of America What a Difference a Decade Makes	MCI and Carterphone Build It and They May Come Uses for Broadband Andrew Carnegie Was a Telegraph Operator

Thank you Mark Lambert – one of my more outstanding students who has done very well for himself as an Iowa Utilities Board member. Thank you Cindy Weeldreyer, and Richard Kimmel, and all who have put together this very exciting event.

The Rural TeleCongress has come a long way in its first eleven years, and it’s an honor to have been invited to share this conference with you.

I’ve already learned a lot from these sessions, and I hope you have, too –  because you’re not going to learn much from this luncheon talk.

What you see before you is a rapidly aging, defrocked FCC Commissioner. It’s not a pretty sight, I realize. But it was the best your conference planners could come up with on short notice.

Actually, I’m trying to do something about that. We have a facility at the University of Iowa called the “Fitness Loft.” You have to climb 73 stairs to get to it. I figure once I’ve done that all I have to do is go back downstairs and go home again.

But my trainer is using me in an experiment. The goal is to see if we can turn me into an old geezer hunk.

That and clean rural living has enabled me to live a number of lives.
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Background and Copyright Notice: These remarks were delivered in a quasi-extemporaneous fashion. There was no audio tape or transcript. The text you see here was compiled from a prepared text (most of which was not used and does not, therefore, appear here), rough handwritten notes on that text, the author's contemporaneous memory of what was said, along with some very minor editing and additions.

Copyright law provides that all documents, such as this one, are "copyright" at the moment of creation. So this, too, is copyright, and thus conditions of use need to be specified.

Although it would not be posted to the Web if it was not intended to be widely shared, there are some conditions. The usual lecture fee was waived for this lecture, so nothing was received for the talk itself or for this writing. To continue in that pro bono spirit of the commons, feel free to read it, to print out one copy for yourself (which includes this notice), or link to this Web page from your Web site. (Link, rather than download and put on your site, so that as changes may be made we'll just have one version out on the Web.) However, no one is authorized to republish the document in hard copy or other media, charge others for access to it, or in any other way profit from its use without the express permission of Nicholas Johnson, njohnson@inav.net.

Thank you and enjoy.

Nicholas Johnson, Iowa City, Iowa, October 9, 2002.
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One of those past lives involved seven years as an FCC Commissioner. Seven years of writing dissenting opinions; seven years complaining about the overreaching of AT&T, and the capitulation of the FCC to corporate interests generally.

Given today’s FCC, we now look back upon my years there, the late 1960s and early ‘70s – years that seemed so horrible at the time – as “The Golden Age of FCC Regulation.”

On a recent trip to Washington I went back to the building that once housed the FCC. Inside the front door is a big sign. It says, “Last man out, turn off the lights.”
 

Among the courses I teach is one I used to call “regulation of broadcasting.” Now it has to be called “non-regulation of broadcasting.” My colleagues want to know how I can justify teaching a law school class about the absence of law.

Are they doing anything in there these days besides making mischief for the rest of us? My current life involves a return to yet another of my earlier careers. I teach in the law school at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

And I want to tell you this current FCC is causing me a lot of grief with my colleagues.

Among the courses I teach is one I used to call “regulation of broadcasting.” Now it has to be called “non-regulation of broadcasting.”

My colleagues want to know how I can justify teaching a law school class about the absence of law.

Are they doing anything in there these days besides making mischief for the rest of us?

My current life involves a return to yet another of my earlier careers. I teach in the law school at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

And I want to tell you this current FCC is causing me a lot of grief with my colleagues.

Among the courses I teach is one I used to call “regulation of broadcasting.” Now it has to be called “non-regulation of broadcasting.”

My colleagues want to know how I can justify teaching a law school class about the absence of law.

As a law professor, of course, I’m used to speaking for entire semesters at a time. I pointed this out to the conference planners, but they insisted on my holding my remarks to no more than two hours.

Anyone want more coffee?

Just kidding.

I’m really only going to talk an hour and a half.

And there is no more coffee.

The title of my talk is “Ernestine in the 21st Century: Take Me Home Country Roads.”

I figured I needed all the help I could get, and Lily Tomlin and John Denver couldn’t hurt.

When I came back home to Iowa from Washington about 1980, I was full of enthusiasm about the economic implications of telecommunications in the “Information Age.” I’d seen what it could do in other countries. I’d written a piece in 1970 called “Communications in the Year 2000” which had proven to be pretty prescient.

I wanted to help my home state of Iowa enjoy the economic development that could come from telecommunications. So I wrote the then-governor of my willingness to apply some of these insights – for free – to Iowa’s economic development. I explained that I didn’t want to bother him personally. All I wanted was the name of his telecommunications advisor.

It took three letters, each expressing the offer in slightly different ways, before I got a response reflecting at least some understanding of what I was talking about. He finally gave me a name and phone number.

Pleased my persistence had paid off, I called, and was surprised when the fellow I had been advised to contact – the man the governor looked to for counsel in this area so crucial to the welfare of his state – answered the phone himself.

I explained how I had obtained his name and the nature of my interest.

“The Governor told you what?” the fellow said incredulously.

“The Governor told me you were his telecommunications advisor,” I repeated.

“Hey, buddy,” he came back, “all I do is pay the phone bill each month.”

Times have changed.

You remember Ernestine, Lily Tomlin’s telephone operator, with that famous retort to a complaining customer, “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the telephone company.”

Now anyone in the telecommunications business has to care. They are probably in competition, not only with more than one telephone company, but with converging technologies and industries not even imagined twenty years ago.

Indeed, it is that imagination that is as rare as it is essential.

Here are some examples from a large number out of my own experience in education. Bear in mind that none of these ideas involved a request that I be paid, or even employed in their implementation. I was just trying to give them away.

• Many years ago I was visiting with a friend in Washington who is in the business of matching government agencies' programs with potential grant recipients – often at the multi-billion-dollar level. We were brainstorming about what is today called telemedicine, but at the time (so far as I knew) was not yet being done anywhere. To my surprise, this was followed with her telling me of a government agency with a multi-million-dollar grant for telemedicine that was essentially ours for the asking. Would my university – one affiliated with the nation's largest teaching hospital – be interested, she asked. I said I’d inquire. Those responsible for such matters didn’t then have sufficient imagination to accept the money. Years later they did – by which time they had to fight for it.

• Around the same time I delivered the keynote address at a Pacific rim conference in Seoul, Korea. While there, it became obvious to me that there was a real demand in those countries for a variety of educational services delivered by satellite from the U.S.  I envisioned a “McUniversity” – educational programs starting in Korea that could be refined and gradually introduced, almost like a franchise, around the other countries. I saw it as something that could produce billions of dollars of income for my institution and state. Once again, the pitch fell on unimaginative ears and ultimately fizzled out as it wended its way through channels. No educational institution would ever want to do such a thing, I was told. Education has to be done in classrooms on an institution’s campus.  It wasn’t many years later before a number of universities were generating revenue – and providing a real service – by using the power and choice of telecommunications technologies of all kinds to deliver their product to eager new markets.

• The institutions resist change would make a very long and diverse list. But school districts have to rank near the top. After all, it took us 50 years to get the overhead projector out of the bowling alley and into the classroom. During the course of my three years on a local school board my batting average for new ideas wasn’t very impressive. Here’s just one example. We have individual education plans, or IEPs, for our special education students in K-12. Why not have an IEP plan for every student, I thought, embodied in a 12-year, online program of computer instruction (many of the modules for which are already available). It could be changed as the student’s interest changed. But at any given point in time it would outline the content that student would need to master to fill her dreams of a future career. Not as a substitute for school, classroom and teacher, but as a supplement. Something that, if a student is sufficiently motivated by her dreams, could be used on a computer in the classroom – or at home. Someday it will exist. But I don’t think it will be anytime soon in my school district.

Unlike the experience I had on returning to Iowa, today most states’ governors do have a telecommunications policy advisor, or someone who can play a comparable role. Our own progressive Governor, Tom Vilsack, has both a science and technology advisor as well as a telecommunications policy advisor. In fact, the latter happens to be another outstanding former student of mine, Richard Varn. He’s Iowa’s CIO, and I’m very proud of what he’s done for our state.

At one time or another I have been in the rural areas of every state represented by the delegates at this convention. In fact, when I first heard John Denver sing “Country Roads” I, too, was spending a good deal of such free time as I had roaming the country roads and trails of West Virginia.

What you and I know is that a major element of happiness is seeing the beauty and joy that is staring you in the face – wherever you happen to be. When you and I are in the mountains of Colorado we don’t complain that there’s no ocean beach. There’s beauty everywhere.

I remember a dinner in Kuala Lumpur one evening with some Malaysian officials. A woman from Washington was also present. Intent on impressing our hosts with the glories of America, she was describing what a rich culture America offered on the East and West coasts – but how very little there was in the barren land in between.

After I had taken about all of this I could stand, I started talking about Johnson County, Iowa. How it has one of the country’s highest average educational levels – perhaps the highest. The nation’s largest teaching hospital, with one of its most highly regarded medical schools. A law school with the most productive public law school faculty in the U.S., and one of the top three law libraries. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and International Writers’ Program, that result in Iowa City producing more poetry and novels per thousand population than any other city in America.

And yet, for all it’s culture and intellectual stimulation, for all its beautiful rivers, lakes and rolling hills, it’s a little toy town with a smaller population than some large apartment house developments in New York. I can walk from home to the law school in four minutes, and on to the center of town in another five.

That is what I call a genuine quality of life.

You know that secret, too. The best of America is between those coasts.

But I was born and raised here in Iowa. And my primary early experience with rural Iowa was provided by my grandfather and uncle’s families in Ida County.

During the 1930s and ‘40s I experienced the impact of new technology on their farms. When I first visited, their operations were not that different from what they would have been 100 years before. Plows pulled by horses. A home lit by kerosene lanterns and heated with a wood-burning kitchen stove. Water pumped by windmill outdoors and a hand pump in the kitchen. Corn picked by hand.
 

I experienced the changes as country roads of muddy ruts evolved to gravel and then paved farm-to-market roads. One hundred years of change in the course of a decade. And central was the role of communications – the radio, the telephone, those rural party lines.

I experienced the changes as country roads of muddy ruts evolved to gravel and then paved farm-to-market roads. As horses rested while tractors did the work. As men enjoyed more leisure while corn pickers picked the corn. Electricity lit the home and pumped the water. One hundred years of change in the course of a decade.

And central was the role of communications – the radio, the telephone, those rural party lines.

When we’d call my relatives from Iowa City it was a big deal on both ends of the line. In Iowa City we had a phone number – even if it was then only four digits. Calls went from the Iowa City operator to the operator in, say, Galva. We’d get a call back from the operator when the connection was made.

When there was no answer at the farm, the operator might say she’d just seen my aunt go across the street to the hardware store and would we like to call her on the phone over there.

We lost something when we lost that kind of service. And the move, the return, to rural America that you make possible, is a reflection of the desire of many to recreate it once again.

Although I said I spent seven years writing dissenting opinions, in fact I wrote a couple of majority opinions as well.

I got my colleagues to go along with authorizing a little fly-by-night private microwave company to build a network from St. Louis to Chicago. That company ultimately became MCI, and that decision one of the mileposts on the road to the breakup of AT&T.

The other involved a Texas cattle rancher who had been fighting AT&T for 13 years, selling off ranches to pay the lawyers. That was the Carterphone case, and the beginning of competition in the manufacture of telephone equipment.

In retrospect, I am more confident of the wisdom and results from the latter than the former decision. The rash of mergers in the telephone industry would tend to suggest that the phone companies themselves may agree, as they seem hell bent on recreating what was broken up in order to create them in the first place.

Iowa is the home of the movie, “Field of Dreams.” “Build it and they will come,” comes close to a state motto.

Actually, I always preferred columnist Donald Kaul’s proposed state motto, “Iowa: Warmer than Minnesota, more fun than Nebraska.” But it turned out it was too long to fit on the license plates.
 

When I fought to include a requirement for public access channels in the FCC’s cable rules I assumed “build it and they will come” would work for  public access, too.

I always preferred columnist Donald Kaul’s proposed state motto, “Iowa: Warmer than Minnesota, more fun than Nebraska.” But it turned out it was too long to fit on the license plates.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m very proud of what has been produced and televised on this nation’s public access channels. In fact, I just recorded a program for public access myself a week ago today. But cable’s potential for democracy is still far, far greater than its reality.

There are many cable subscribers who are perfectly content to watch, rather than make, television programs. As I once advised a telephone company executive, “What you don’t understand is that Americans don’t want interactive TV. They don’t even want active TV. They want passive TV.”

Similarly, there are at least a few remaining country dwellers who want nothing more than a black, rotary-dial phone and a crossbar switch. And they’d really be content if they could still get that service for the three dollars a month it used to cost.

Your conference brochure speaks of, quote,

“populations who are not ‘technologically savvy’ and are therefore not taking full advantage of the power of the world wide web to create wealth while allowing them to enjoy the benefits of living in a rural setting.”

As John Prine once advised in the lyrics to one of his songs,

“Blow up your TV
Throw away your paper
Move to the country
Build yourself a home.”

“The choice you’ll never know is the choice you’ll never make.” We want Americans to know about their choices.

After all, a farmer today can use a GPS – geo-positioning satellite receiver – and a computer to specify precise fertilizer pattern placement, or plant his corn, while sitting inside the cab of his tractor.

When he shuts off that tractor and goes into his office shouldn’t he be able to have the broadband Internet access that could tell him the price of that corn – or deliver continuing education courses, or tele-medicine services right to his home?
 

In fact, why shouldn’t he be able to use his broadband access to create the price of that corn? Cut out all the intermediaries he must go through now. There’s no reason he shouldn’t be able to utilize a kind of commodities E-Bay to offer his corn for sale globally, and then sell it directly to whichever buyer in the world is willing to give him the best price.

Why not auction off hogs on the World Wide Web 24/7, in streaming video, rather than in steamy auction barns?

And speaking of agricultural auctions, think about livestock. Why not auction off hogs on the World Wide Web 24/7, in streaming video, rather than in steamy auction barns?

My uses of the Internet, and now broadband, have primarily focused on education.

I’ve been making documents available on the Internet, and using it for e-mail communication, since the late 1970s. I’ve had a Web site since there was a Web.

When serving on the local school board in Iowa City I decided to write a regular column about K-12 issues for the local paper. Frankly, when I began I didn’t know that much about elementary and secondary education. What I quickly found out was that of the two billion or more sites that Google can search in less than one second there are thousands with reports of best practices and data about what works in K-12.

In fact, there are few, if any, problems confronting any of the 15,000 school districts in this country that have not been solved, and reported on the Internet, somewhere.

What’s true for research about K-12 is true for virtually any subject you can imagine – including those closest to your interests. It’s like putting the Library of Congress in every home in America.

Much of my law school teaching is done on the Internet. The assignments are posted there. The readings those assignments refer to are there. The students’ papers are posted there and available to the world. Those, and the other sites linked from my main Web page are now regularly visited by users in over 125 countries.

Incidentally, my site is www.nicholasjohnson.org. Since I don’t seem to have ever done much of anything during my life that could be considered  “com,” I decided I should be an “org.”

The population of the United States has literally doubled – from about 140 million to 280 million – since those boyhood years of mine in Iowa I was describing earlier.

Clearly we don’t need more people putting economic and other burdens on our urban centers and suburbs.

Clearly we do need more in our small towns and rural areas.

Telecommunications is what makes that population shift possible. And you are what makes those telecommunications services possible.
 

Clearly we don’t need more people putting economic and other burdens on our urban centers and suburbs. Clearly we do need more in our small towns and rural areas. Telecommunications is what makes that population shift possible.

You know the economic and other value to rural America of the range of services available on the Web – everything from health care, to education, to job opportunities, to the market it provides for goods and services.

Look around you. Do you realize that with nothing more than the human resources in this room – your academic training and credentials, your experience, the stories you can tell – there is nothing you could not accomplish.

Indeed, some of you, like yesterday's speaker, Sharon Black, remind me of the story of President Kennedy’s remarks at his dinner for Nobel Prize winners. “Seldom has so much intelligence been present at a single White House dinner,” he said, and then added, “Except perhaps on those rare occasions in the past when Thomas Jefferson used to dine alone.”

Sharon apparently has academic credentials and experience in law and engineering and economics and public policy.

But when you combine all of the skills and experience represented by all of you as a group, you have it all.

Now you may not want to work on this together. You may have so many obligations with your present jobs that you can’t. The salesman’s adage is, “Plan your work, and then work your plan.” You may not be able to agree on your plan.

All I’m saying is that if you did agree on the plan, and then work it, you have in this room all it would take to transform rural America.

The fact is that during any period of history it is those who truly understand the implications of the communications technology of their time who make the greatest contributions to social change – and often to their own wealth.
 

Andrew Carnegie became what some say was the world’s richest man of his time. He built what came to be called U.S. Steel – and then spent the rest of his life trying to give away his wealth.

It is those who truly understand the implications of the communications technology of their time who make the greatest contributions to social change.

The concept of tying together multiple steel mills, the necessary ingredients, transportation, and multiple markets was formerly unthinkable. It was thought a CEO could only oversee what he could literally see.

Where did this insight of Carnegie’s come from? Carnegie had begun his career as a telegraph operator. He reflected upon his ability as a very young man to control the movement of trains he could not see, hundreds of miles away. If trains, he thought, why not other enterprises.

Even when he traveled China, and elsewhere around the world, he may not have used a laptop to connect to the Internet – since neither existed – but he was doing the equivalent with a regular stream of what were then called “cables.”

Another young telegraph operator would grow up to have a major impact on late 19th Century rural America. Like Carnegie, he too saw the possibility of outreach to, and oversight of, a vast geographical area. In his case it was the idea of a store that could serve far more than a single community. His catalogs and products were soon to be found throughout the countryside. His name? Richard Sears.

Another young telegraph operator saw the possibilities of turning the lemons of “wireless telegraphy” – the fact that messages intended for one could be heard by many – into the lemonade that ultimately became commercial radio and later television. His name was David Sarnoff. His little broadcasting effort came to be called the National Broadcasting Company, or NBC.

Few of you have been telegraph operators. But all of you understand the communications technology of your time. And there is no reason why all of you together cannot do for our country today what Carnegie, Sears and Sarnoff did for our country in their day.

Among the non-profit organizations boards on which I have served in recent years is one called VITA, for “Volunteers in Technical Assistance”. One of our projects involved the use of low earth-orbiting satellites, or LEOs, to provide at least e-mail communication from any remote village on earth at extraordinarily cheap rates. Another project was the provision of what are called “micro-loans.”

Although not one of our projects, you may have read about the micro-loan program in Bangladesh that put a cell phone in numerous villages. Not only did it create a business for the operator of the single cell phone, selling off individual calls, but it has contributed to economic betterment for everyone in the village.

You may know that one of the fastest growing high tech centers today, the source of much of our new computer software and the location of many of those 800-number operators you call, is Bangalore, India.

That’s what telecommunications makes possible today.
 

The country roads that took me home to Iowa are not the ones of which John Denver sang. They are the roads and bridges that you are building from rural America to the 21st Century and beyond; the roads of coax and optic fiber, of wireless and satellite signals. They are the roads from our rural villages to that global village called cyberspace.

It’s what you’re trying to make possible for rural American today. And I say, if it can be done in Bangladesh and Bangalore we ought to be able to do it for America.

You’re on the right track. Those who are standing in your way, who don’t understand, who oppose, or try to slow, your progress are simply wrong.

It won’t be easy, but you will prevail. You must prevail.

Because today the country roads that took me home to Iowa are not the ones of which John Denver sang. They are the roads and bridges that you are building from rural America to the 21st Century and beyond; the roads of coax and optic fiber, of wireless and satellite signals. They are the roads from our rural villages to that global village called cyberspace.

Thank you for the opportunity to share this exciting conference with you, and good luck.