Professor Farber Gets an Education

By Aaron Pressman

Issue Date: Jun 26 2000

The FCC’s new chief technologist is trying to untangle the agency’s massive legacy of regulation to help the Internet grow. He’s got a few things to learn.

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Dave Farber, internet pioneer and University of Pennsylvania computer science professor, came to Washington in January to be chief technologist at the Federal Communications Commission. Farber figured he could teach the bureaucrats a few things about the Net. It turns out he had a few things to learn about politics.

Soon after starting his job, Farber says, he held a meeting with a senator (he declines to say which one) who expressed a desire to become an Internet expert, despite a near-total ignorance of all things Net-related. Must have been an impressive lesson: A week later, the senator filed a bill covering critical Net policy issues.

"The question is, where the hell did this bill come from?" wonders Farber, a balding, bespectacled, slightly rumpled 65-year-old who looks like the veteran academic that he is. Sitting in his tiny, windowless office in FCC headquarters, Farber goes on to answer his own question: "I suspect most of these kind of bills are carefully designed to placate somebody and yet be taken far enough with amendments that nobody in their sane mind would pass them."

Farber says he's actually been impressed with most of the bureaucrats and politicians he's met, but nonetheless has been amazed at their lack of technical knowledge.

Bringing Farber to the FCC stemmed from a desire on the commission's part to insert a dose of technological reality into the maelstrom of legalistic argument that swirls through the agency's headquarters in southwest Washington. Explains Farber: "These lawyers and economists create beautiful models, and periodically I stick in a crowbar - my technological crowbar - and say that's fine but that's not the way it works."

In a way, Farber has played that role for a decade as the editor and gatekeeper of the well-known Interesting People e-mail list. Farber and his highly placed group of 25,000 subscribers exchange news and gossip about recent developments affecting the Net. In a typical day, IP subscribers might receive a dozen new items on a wide variety of topics related to technology policy.

As an academic, Farber has never been shy about stepping on toes. And as a tenured professor on leave from Penn, Farber has a degree of independence that few FCC employees enjoy. "There's no reason I have to be nice," he says with a wry grin. Farber adds that the FCC's permanent employees have seen dozens of commissioners come and go, and have a tendency to maintain the status quo.

It remains to be seen whether Farber's efforts to shake up things will result in smarter policy. Dave Crocker, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based consultant who, like Farber, was a computer networking pioneer, isn't sure anyone will listen. "My guess is that the most he can do is hammer away at the technical truths that Washington often isn't aware of," says Crocker, who has known Farber since the '70s, when Farber served as his adviser at the University of Delaware. "That will only work if people's ears are receptive."

In many ways, Farber is the perfect chief technologist for the FCC. Before becoming one of Judge Jackson's favorite witnesses in the Microsoft (MSFT) antitrust trial, Farber spent 40 years on the cutting edge of computer science and communications developments working on the early networks that grew into the Internet at Bell Labs, Rand Corp. and in academia.

"We absolutely needed somebody who had the Internet perspective and who could articulate how technology was going to radically change and restructure the industry," says Stagg Newman, Farber's FCC predecessor and the man who approached Farber about taking the post. While asking Farber to solicit nominations from the IP mailing list, Newman also probed the list's master. "It wasn't too hard to convince him," he says.

To take the job, Farber had two requirements: no paperwork and an opportunity to learn about the FCC's Net philosophy from the inside. On the first point, at least, Farber seems to be getting what he wanted: Far less paper is piling up on his desk than on those of his FCC colleagues. Aside from a few family snapshots, Farber's office is decorated with mementos of his hits in the mainstream media: There's a copy of a 1996 People magazine profile and a courtroom artist's sketch of him at the Microsoft trial.

The subject of Farber's second requirement, the FCC's Net strategy, is more complicated. It would be an exaggeration to say that the FCC needs a remedial education in Web technology. The agency has struggled with Internet issues for years, usually adopting policies to keep the online world growing, but it occasionally runs into problematic legacy regulations.

The patchwork of rules built by the agency and Congress over the decades continues to trip up certain Net businesses. For instance, while long-distance phone service subsidizes local service, Internet-based telephony services aren't charged the subsidy because Internet traffic is exempt from access fees that back local-service subsidies. In the broadband arena, customers of high-speed links over phone wires must be able to use any ISP - but cable's high-speed pipes appear to fall into a different regulatory framework, limiting operators' ISP choices.

On the cable broadband issue, the FCC decided as early as February 1999 to not require cable operators to share their high-speed lines with other ISPs. FCC Chairman William Kennard and others argued that competition from other types of broadband services, like DSL, wireless and satellite offerings, would put enough competitive pressure on cable to prevent the operators from misusing their bottleneck position. Eventually, cable operators ATT (dossier) and Time Warner (dossier) (after falling under AOL's sway) announced that they would allow competing ISPs onto their lines in a few years.

Technological crowbar in hand, Farber is wading into the fray. A few years is too long to wait for cable ISP competition when the world is moving at Internet speed, he warns. Cable companies and their affiliated ISPs will have already signed up millions of customers and deployed millions more pieces of equipment incapable of supporting an open-access system.

"There may be nobody left," Farber says. "You're saying you'll have an open community when there's potentially nobody left and you've driven all your competitors out?"

Farber's view of the open-access problem is informed by his years at Rand, where legendary futurist Herman Kahn taught strategists to imagine worst-case scenarios and think the unthinkable: How could nuclear war be won? Even if cable companies let other ISPs onto their lines, he notes, they could still use routers and caching technology to handicap sites run by everyone but their affiliates.

Farber says he'll hammer away with doomsday scenarios, even as cable companies move forward with plans for sharing their lines. AT&T plans to begin trials of shared ISP access in Boulder, Colo., by year's end. The industry continues to argue that market discipline, not government regulation, will best prevent any provider from misusing a choke-point position.

Farber's interest in the issue has stirred hope among pro-regulatory forces that the FCC will do more than "closely monitor" the situation.

"On the pro's side, you now have a voice of sophistication and intelligence trying to work patiently within the system," says Jeffrey Chester, an advocate for shared access and executive director of the nonprofit Center for Media Education in Washington. "But I don't know if he understands the role that corruption plays here."

The FCC has also refused to regulate Internet telephony, although Farber thinks that policy could change under future commissioners. The current stance reflects a "perfectly rational" approach, he says, adding: "Whether it can be sustained, I don't know."

Washington is Farber's first big city. While teaching at Penn in Philadelphia, he commuted an hour each way from Landenberg, Pa., a rural town near the Delaware border. Now, Farber and his wife enjoy the easy access to restaurants and museums near their downtown Washington apartment.

"I'm beginning to understand more and more what people call Potomac Fever," Farber says. "If you're not careful you can actually think you're having an impact on the world."

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