FCC Chair Julius Genachowski on the Future High-Speed Internet

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Julius Genachowski, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, speaks to Judy Woodruff on how a broadband strategy for universal high-speed Internet will create jobs. Follow live tweets @dkthomp.

9:40: Genachoski makes a scary point. The U.S. is 6th out of 40 countries in access to high-speed Internet. But we're 40th out of 40 in the speed of our improvement. We should be the first country in the world to move from paper to electronic textbooks, he continues.

9:25: What the heck is net neutrality, anyway? Genachowski tries to answer the question. I'm paraphrasing from here on out... It's about preserving the freedom of the Internet. Right now, any innovator or speaker can use the Internet to reach anybody in the audience and anybody can access anything on the Internet. Recently, the FCC has tried to preserve that. The demand of spectrum from phones and iPads is outpacing the supply of spectrum. So we need to expand our capacity for information to reduce congestion and keep the Internet open.

9:15
Without high speed broadband infrastructure, you'll have smaller job creation. Most small businesses have local markets, but we can reach any consumer in the world with high speed internet. That's higher revenue. Access from high speed Internet also helps cut down costs by storing information and organizing it in the cloud. That's lower spending that firms can put to workers.

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Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees business coverage for TheAtlantic.com. More

Thompson has written for Slate, BusinessWeek, and the Daily Beast. He has also appeared as a guest on radio and television networks, including NPR, the BBC, CNBC, and MSNBC.

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