William Kennard

William Earl Kennard, the first African American to serve as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, is the nation’s newest top cop on the information superhighway. A bright and likable bureaucrat, Kennard’s easy-going personality and youth belie both the speed with which he has ascended the career ladder and the challenges he faces in regulating one of the nation’s fastest-growing and most powerful industries: telecommunications.

Kennard’s father, Robert A. Kennard, a pioneer in his own right, was a distinguished Los Angeles architect who built the largest, continuously operating black-owned architectural practice in the western United States. The elder Kennard, who died in 1995, was drawn to the profession by the success of Paul Williams, an African American who designed homes for Hollywood’s rich and famous from the 1920s through the 1950s. The FCC chairman says his father imbued in him a gritty determination to succeed as well as a motivation to cultivate what he calls “the essential goodness in people.”

But Kennard, a Los Angeles native who graduated from Stanford University, also knows it helps to have powerful connections. He has close ties to President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, fellow Yale Law School alumni. And he counts among his friends civil-rights attorney Vernon Jordan and Bob Johnson, chairman of Black Entertainment Television.

The youngest of three children, Kennard grew up in the Hollywood Hills and graduated from Hollywood High School. He was student body president as well as an aficionado of mini-bike riding as a teenager. Today, Kennard remains an outdoor enthusiast, pursuing his interests in fishing and hiking. He is married to Deborah D. Kennedy, an attorney for Mobile Oil Corp.

Before becoming FCC chairman, Kennard, who turned 41 last week, had questioned the increasing concentration of media holdings, championed greater minority ownership and pondered whether to rein in broadcasters’ 1st Amendment rights.

Yet, three months into his new job, Kennard remains something of an enigma. He has said little about his views on the key telecommunications issues. Unlike his predecessor, has, so far, steered clear of industry confrontations. After releasing a report last week decrying skyrocketing cable rates, for example, he urged additional study of the problem rather than immediate FCC action, citing the FCC’s limited authority to combat the problem.

Kennard, looking relaxed in shirt sleeves and tie, sat down for an interview last week, after returning from a four-day trip to California. He had traveled to the Golden State to hold several meetings and tour some nonprofit communications projects--and also to stop by his alma mater, Hollywood High, where he was inducted into the school’s hall of fame.

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Question: Your father Robert Kennard, who died in 1995, was a highly regarded Los Angeles architect and one of the founding members of the National Organization of Minority Architects. Tell us a little about him and how he affected your life.

Answer: He was probably the single greatest influence in my life. He grew up in a very different era. He fought in World War II and then came back to Los Angeles. He finished his education on the GI Bill and then pursued his dream of being an architect.

Everybody told him he wouldn’t make it; that he couldn’t have a black-owned architectural firm in Los Angeles at that time. And he just persevered. He would come home and tell us [people] wouldn’t take him seriously and say terrible things about him. But, ultimately, he built a great business and became the largest African-American owned architectural firm on the West Coast.

He did the L.A. City High School. He renovated the Los Angeles County Library and portions of the L.A. transit system. He built communities with the technology of his time--which was bringing people together around bricks and mortar.

What I’m trying to do is very similar to what my dad did. But it’s a different medium. I’m trying to do what I can to foster community through the use of the electronic media.

Q: You say your father grew up in a different time. But today, you are the first African American chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. Would you say the challenges you face are different from those faced by your father as a pioneering black architect?

A: Yes, I think the challenges are very different now. One of the biggest responsibilities of being an African American in this job is to understand that I’m here because I’m standing on the shoulders of a lot of people who helped struggle and fought the fight to get me here. And I have a responsibility to those folks to reach down and make sure I’m not the last, and create opportunities for others.

Q: Did the time you spent growing up in California affect the way you now look at issues in Washington?

A: California has really been on the cutting edge of a lot of the developments in telecommunications. The Internet community has a huge presence in California as well as the computer industry. So it’s important for us to reach outside the beltway and make sure that constituencies that are important to what we are doing, get a voice here. That’s the single most important mission of the FCC, which is to make sure our decision making is inclusive.

Q: Since the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, we’ve been hearing that more competition will emerge. Yet your agency recently released a report saying cable TV rates are rising. And you’ve also said that robust local phone competition is still a ways off. Why hasn’t competition developed more quickly to give consumers more choice and lower prices?

A: One reason is that too many of the stakeholders in this debate would rather litigate than compete. As a result, the act that Congress wrote--which is fundamentally a good piece of legislation--is being rewritten by judges. I fundamentally believe if we just allow the act to be implemented, and not rewritten in the courts, we would be farther along than we are today. But I’m optimistic about this. I think competition will [eventually] arrive. We’ve already seen the benefit of competition in some industries: long distance, customer premises equipment, wireless phones . . . . We’re not going to go back in those markets. So it’s a question of making sure those benefits get extended to the last bastions of monopoly power in this country: cable television and local phone service.

Q: One of the most discernible effects of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 so far has been the huge increase in the number of media mergers. That has resulted in a decline in the diversity of media--particularly among small and minority owners. In the past, you have encouraged Congress to support minority ownership. Now that you are chairman, do you plan to do anything to further that goal?

A: I want to focus a lot of attention on it. The consolidation that we are seeing in these industries has an impact on our culture and our national community. This is not just about minority business. It’s about small businesses. It’s about small independent producers, some of whom are having difficulty getting access to [communications] networks the same way they used to. When the media of mass communications consolidates in a dramatic fashion, this has lots of collateral consequences that we in government, I believe, have an obligation to study and shed some light on. And that’s what I intend to do.

Q: On the other hand, there are some consumers who feel that in some instances the burgeoning media has produced too much choice and confusion. For example, with wireless telephones, there are now about a half-dozen incompatible mobile phones. Should the FCC become a stronger force in the standards setting business?

A: In most cases, the marketplace is far superior to sorting out these issues than the FCC. Take the wireless marketplace. In some cases, you can get phones that technology has derived ways to make them inter-operable. You can get dual-handset phones that will receive both digital and analog cellular signals. That’s the marketplace solving that problem.

Those solutions are always preferable to a government agency enforcing some industrial policy. Look at the alternative: Given the administrative process . . . the stakeholders in the standards debate have every incentive to try to influence the process so that their standard is selected. As a result, you would get years of administrative delay and litigation. It’s much better to . . . let the marketplace sort it out.

Q: Speaking of litigation, you are a lawyer who formerly headed the FCC general counsel’s office. And your agency has been taking it on the chin lately in court. The FCC has lost several big cases to the regional Bell companies, including one on New Year’s Eve, where a federal judge overturned an FCC decision blocking a local phone company from entering the long distance business. Why are federal judges giving the FCC a hard time?

A: The Telecommunications Act is a new piece of legislation and a very complex piece of legislation. Whenever you have a new statute, there are all sorts of opportunities for parties to try to exploit ambiguities in the statute. Here we have an instance where parties have engaged in forum shopping to try to go across the country to find the judge that they think will be most favorable to their cause. With the benefit of hindsight, I think we would have been better off if we had consolidated all of these cases in a single court. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit handles most FCC appeals. They have a lot of expertise in this area. They move quickly and you wouldn’t have the opportunity for gamesmanship that you are seeing.

Every time we have an appeal of a major rule making coming out of the 1996 act, it’s like “Wheel of Fortune.” The parties are trying to get the case in the 8th Circuit Court, the 5th Circuit or the D.C. Circuit and, as a result, we are getting a patchwork of decisions. It’s a recipe for confusion and it’s unfortunate.

Q: With many experts predicting that more and more telephone dialing will migrate from the switched telephone network onto the Internet, will that pose a problem in terms of telephone access charges and shifting the cost burden onto Internet users and service providers?

A: Well, Congress has asked the FCC to look into this question and we are in the process of developing a record which will answer the very question you pose and we will be releasing a report in April . . . . It’s a really important question because basically what you have is two separate networks developing in this country. The old analog network was subject to the existing regulatory framework, which has been built up over the last 100 years. And you have the packet switched data networks, which are relatively new. And we have to decide whether the old paradigm is appropriate for these new networks.

Q: Do the demands of your job give you much time to watch TV or surf the Internet?

A: Not as much as I used to, but I still squeeze in some time on the Net. I love the Internet for historical research. You can access libraries or museums and get information quickly. Not long ago, for example, I saw the movie, “Amistad.” And I was really interested in that story. I went on the Internet and was able to pull up lots of information about what historians had written about that incident in our history. Even five years ago, if you had seen that movie, you probably wouldn’t have taken the time to go to a public library that had that information. But I just went home after the movie and booted up the computer and was able to read all of this stuff. It was great.