➤ FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington says the lines that used to divide tech companies, communications companies and commerce entities have become blurred, presenting a regulatory challenge for Congress.

➤ A new FCC-NTIA spectrum initiative is "exactly the right thing at the right time," the commissioner also said as the agencies look back on the C-band deployment dispute.

➤ The commissioner believes the FCC has the authority to issue regulations relating to Section 230, a prized liability shield for online platforms.

Nathan Simington is the newest member of the Federal Communications Commission, but just one year into his role, the former National Telecommunications and Information Administration, or NTIA, official is bringing his all to the table. The Republican commissioner recently spoke with S&P Global Market Intelligence about his reaction to the FCC and NTIA's newly announced Spectrum Coordination Initiative, as well as his views on inter-agency collaboration and social media regulation. What follows is an interview that has been edited for length and clarity.

FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington Source: FCC

S&P Global Market Intelligence: You're a classically trained violinist. How does a musician become one of the most influential telecommunications lawyers in Washington?

Nathan Simington: It's one of these things that I certainly did not predict when I moved to the United States for the first time in 1999. I've only been a U.S. citizen for about five years, so this is still a bit of a journey for me.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with the old joke about the difference between a musician and a large pizza, but it's that a large pizza can feed a family of four. And when I started to look at a second career after leaving music academia, law school presented itself naturally. I started off as a finance lawyer, and then I wound up working in telecom finance. I was uniquely well-positioned because the company that I worked with was a major service provider to Sprint and also had a major market intelligence unit, which was my primary affiliation there, but it was not actually a holder of regulated spectrum. It was a pretty good background to bring to the NTIA.

The last thing I'd add is that music is spectrum, too, right? Although you have to increase the rate of vibration by a factor of about 1,000, a lot of the concepts that you bring out of acoustics are oddly relevant in spectrum policy. I have to say it's a little bit of an unconventional background. But on the other hand, we have a lot of people join the commission from a wide variety of backgrounds. I'm happy to be here. I think everyone brings a little bit of themselves to whatever they do.

We heard the announcement this week that the FCC and the NTIA are now going to be holding formal meetings to address spectrum planning matters as part of a new coordination initiative. Do you have any initial reaction to this?

I think it is great news. I think everyone was crying out for it, to be honest. It's exactly the right thing at the right time. Coordination with spectrum, particularly with federal users, is a very complicated question because federal users very often have different imperatives and different senses of what's effective than the commercial sector. With the commercial sector right now, of course, everyone wants as much 5G mid-band spectrum as possible because the demand on the consumer side for 5G mid-band is so intense. And demand is so intense because traffic is up so sharply. I remember when an unlimited data plan was a luxury that I couldn't have contemplated. And now it seems like something that I can't live without, and I suspect a lot of people feel the same way.

I would love to see the NTIA continuing to lead policy in this area. It's great to see this continued formal recognition of the dual responsibility. Federal users represent such a diverse community, everything from radioastronomy to the air traffic controllers. Part of the job of the NTIA, which they do very well, is to be the expert clearinghouse for that spectrum. So it's a great step. I'm sure that it's just a first step to continue harmonizing policy.

This is the first part of a two-part Q&A with Nathan Simington. The second part part can be found here: 'Regulatory ping-pong' on net neutrality slows investment, FCC's Simington says

How do you think the FCC should coordinate with other agencies, notably agencies that don't formally regulate spectrum, like the Federal Trade Commission?

These agencies were set up at a time when certain practices that we now take for granted were just in their infancy. The FCC, of course, had its roots in addressing the public interest in the broadcast space and, on the other hand, addressing the pre-breakup of AT&T Inc. And so those absolutely made sense at the time that the FCC was set up. There wasn't really any further responsibility for the commission to take. And of course, we've evolved with the times, and now we're involved in satellite and wireless mobility. And some of the traditional sectors concerning the FCC have started to share the stage more with emerging technology.

The FTC and the FCC used to have a very easily defined division of labor. The FTC was regulating commerce and the FCC was regulating communication, and the two did not overlap. Now we have increasingly a blending of non-telecommunication companies with telecommunication functions that would have been weird to contemplate.

Amazon.com Inc. is a major player in the data center space, for example. I'm pretty sure we all use AWS many times daily. It is as if Sears, IBM and AT&T had been the same company back in the day. Are they a telecommunications company? Well, certainly not when I'm buying pillows. Is it merely a commercial entity? Well, I don't know. It distributes video content sort of like the traditional broadcast function although online and not with facilities-based broadcasting. Is it a telephone company? Well, I don't think they have last-mile connections anywhere. But all of the major online platforms offer some sort of video conferencing or voice conferencing service. So I guess what I would say is the boundaries have blurred, and we have to figure out how we want to change with the times.

People talk about having the FCC regulate internet platforms. Well, I'm not sure what that does to a company like Etsy, for example, which is primarily sale of goods. I don't know that we would be an extra regulator for them. On the other hand, a company that delivers traditional telephony service but just does it on a non-facilities-based platform, well, that seems like something that the FCC should regulate. But it's a slippery slope because the two seem to blend into one another. So what coordination looks like going forward is a larger question for society to decide.

I think this is part of what Congress is trying to address right now. And I'm not sure that consensus has emerged about how to move forward. Now what this means for the agencies at this point — that's also a little bit of a problem. If it's not clear whether the FTC or the FCC should be the regulators, it may be that something is unregulated at a time when the general public would be best served by regulation.

I encourage Congress and the American people to think about this actively because it's probably Congress' role at some point to allocate these responsibilities, and it's going to be a hard job. I certainly don't blame them for not coming to a consensus. But it's the challenge of our generation in the media and communications world.

Social media has come under heavy scrutiny over the past year, and we are already seeing new legislative efforts to reign in these platforms. But the FCC is not formally charged with regulating social media. Do you think the commission may get involved in these matters?

I point to an October 2020 blog post from Tom Johnson, a former general counsel for the FCC where he laid out the arguments that the FCC does, in fact, have the authority to interpret and issue regulations relating to Section 230. Johnson concluded, and I think his reasoning and his citations are really hard to refute, that the FCC does have this capacity. So the question becomes, do we exercise this capacity?

Now you've touched on both the role of social media and society and also the role of social media as enabling telephony. And I'd like to split those two. The degree that there's an argument for regulating nonfacility-based telephony or similar communications tools, that's very different from a content regulatory regime on social media.

Personally, I would be very, very, very wary of the FCC doing anything that was potentially problematic under the First Amendment. I think the idea of prior restraints on speech and the government dictating what you can say online is alarming. When people talk about censorship on social media, they're often referring to the company's business decisions. So the question becomes to what degree is there some sort of a common interest here. And that's not easily answered. I don't think there's a clear commission consensus on how to act in this area.