Verizon on broadband leadership

Last Tuesday, Verizon Chair and CEO Ivan Seidenberg had a ‘fireside chat’ with Alan Murray of the Wall Street Journal at an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations. The transcript of the interview is worthwhile reading and it includes Seidenberg’s masterful handling of an open Q&A as well.

You can also watch the interview on video. Some of his comments are particularly relevant to a number of activities we’re following on the Canadian policy and regulatory front: regulated wholesale access (CRTC 09-261); the obligation to serve and basic service objective (CRTC 10-43); national digital strategy; Parliamentary INDU Committee hearings; and more .

Among the tidbits that resonated most with me:

I fear that when industry — not just us, but any company makes capital allocations decisions, if we start out with 2, 3, 4 billion dollars worth of government mandates that really don’t have any reality in how the market works, I worry about that, because that just adds costs, it reduces our incentive to invest in this country, and it affects hiring, and you know all the other things that go with that.

And

Anytime government — whether it’s the FCC or any agency — decides it knows what the market wants and makes that a static requirement, you always lose. So this FCC decided that speed of the network was the most important issue. So that’s all they measured.

…

In Japan, where everybody looks at Japan as being so far ahead, they may have faster speeds, but we have higher utilization of people using the Internet. So our view is, whenever you look at these issues, you have to be very careful to look at what the market wants, not what government says is the most important issue.

Seidenberg talks about universal service obligations, about choice, about freedoms to let service providers innovate. Interesting points to talk about over the water cooler this week.