Two Think Minimum

Cathryn Ross is Strategy and Regulatory Affairs Director at Thames Water. She is responsible for shaping and embedding a strategy to ensure that Thames Water delivers for customers, communities and the environment. She is an experienced regulatory and competition economist and has worked across a number of different sectors advising on economic, regulatory and competition issues.

Julie Owono is the Executive Director of Internet Sans Frontières (Internet Without Borders), an inaugural member of the Facebook Oversight Board, and the Executive Director of the Content Policy & Society Lab, a project of the Progam on Democracy and the Internet at Stanford University. At the intersection of Business and Human Rights, her work focuses on creating channels of collaboration between different set of actors of the Internet. She is particularly interested in finding policy and technical solutions to foster collaborations for a better content moderation on online platforms. Julie is an Affiliate of the Berkman Kleine Center on Internet and Society at Harvard University, a member of the Global Partnership on AI (AI) created by France and Canada, of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on AI for Humanity, of the WEF Council on the Connected World. She was also a member of UNESCO’s Ad Hoc Expert Group (AHEG) for the Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, a Member of the World Benchmarking Alliance’s Expert Committee on Digital Inclusion, and a Civil Society member of the Global Network Initiative’s Board. Julie graduated in International Law from La Sorbonne University in Paris, and practiced as a lawyer at the Paris Bar.

Tim Muris was chairman of the FTC from 2001 to 2004. He was director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection from 1981 to 1983 and of the Bureau of Competition from 1983 to 1985 and an assistant to the director of the Office of Policy Planning and Evaluation from 1974 to 1976. He currently is George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School, senior counsel at Sidley Austin and a visiting senior fellow at AEI [American Enterprise Institute]. Howard Beales was director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the FTC from 2001 to 2004. He was associate director for policy and evaluation from 1983 to 1987. He was an assistant to the director from 1981 to 1983 and a staff economist from 1977 to 1981. He currently is emeritus professor of Strategic Management and Public Policy at the George Washington University School of Business and a visiting senior fellow at AEI.

Joel Waldfogel is Associate Dean of MBA programs at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management. He was previously the Ehrenkranz Family Professor of Business and Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, where he served as department chair and associate vice dean. Prior to Wharton, he was an associate professor of economics at Yale University.

Jennifer Fauver joins Two Think Minimum to discuss her new research paper entitled, “Putting a Number on the Debate: An Empirical Assessment of the U.S. Federal Antitrust Enforcement by State Attorneys General.” The article focuses on the enduring debate regarding the appropriate role for State AGs in federal antitrust enforcement. She adds to the empirical legal studies literature with a novel dataset of antitrust enforcement by state attorneys general from the last twenty years. She provides a cost-benefit analysis of State AG enforcement institutions. Jenn has more than 20 years of experience in law and economics, having worked for NERA Economic Consulting in antitrust litigation. She is a recent graduate of George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School and headed off to private practice at Wilson Sonsini this fall.

Today, we are delighted to have as our guest, Evan Kwerel, who is Senior Economic Advisor at the Federal Communications Commission. The impact of Evan's career at the FCC was recognized last year, when he was awarded the 2021 Paul Volcker Career Achievement Award for pioneering the use of spectrum auctions. To get an idea of what Evan has accomplished and to introduce the discussion, let me read the first couple of paragraphs from the citation. “During more than three decades as a Federal Communications Commission economist, Evan Kwerel has been a key driver of America’s wireless revolution, establishing the first-ever competitive auctions to allocate public airwaves for the transmission of sound, data, and video across the country while raising billions of dollars for the government. The market-based FCC auctions of electromagnetic spectrum, the radio frequencies that carry voices between cell phones, television shows from broadcasters and online information from one computer to the next, were conceived and implemented by Kwerel based on many of the theories of 2020 Nobel Prize-winning economists Paul Milgrom and Bob Wilson. Since the early 1990s, a total of 107 FCC spectrum auctions have generated more than $200 billion in revenue for the government. After winning the Nobel Prize, Milgrom wrote that ‘Evan’s individual contributions were so major that it would have been appropriate for him to share this prize.’”

Stan is a Senior Consultant with Charles River Associates. He's a nationally recognized expert in the economics of intellectual property rights, telecommunications policy, and telecommunications and computer standards. Stan has taught at Rice, Columbia, and the Georgetown University Law Center. And in government, he was a Brookings Economic Policy Fellow for the Office of Telecommunications Policy and the Executive Office of the President and Co-Director of the Network Inquiry Special Staff at the Federal Communications Commission. Prior to joining CRA, he was a Senior Economist at the Rand Corporation. Phil is a Senior Research Fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School. Phil has practiced communications and antitrust law in the government and private law firms for nearly five decades. In the Obama administration, he served as Senior Counselor to the FCC chairman. And before that, as Ambassador and US Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy. Earlier in his career, he was an antitrust prosecutor at the DOJ, where he was lead counsel for the US v. AT&T case, and also at the FTC, and he has been chief of three FCC bureaus.

As states ramp up their efforts to distribute broadband funding, policymakers will need data to help them identify the areas of their state that are in dire need of investment. On the latest edition of Two Think Minimum, Scott Wallsten, Sarah Oh, and Nathaniel Lovin discussed TPI’s broadband mapping initiative, which aims to put existing metrics into context and provide decision-makers with actionable intelligence. By harnessing the power of cloud computing, TPI’s broadband map allows users to seamlessly combine datasets and arrive at insights that would have been impossible to glean from a single source.

Adam Kovacevich is the founder and CEO of the Chamber of Progress, a new, center-left tech industry policy coalition promoting technology's progressive future. The organization works to ensure that all Americans benefit from technological leaps and that the tech industry operates responsibly and fairly. Adam is a veteran Democratic tech industry leader who has had a front-row seat for more than 20 years in the tech industry's political maturation.

Jonathan Make is the former Executive Editor at Warren Communications, which includes Comms Daily, where he's also a journalist. He joined the Warren Communications staff in 2005 after covering the industry at Bloomberg, and after moving to Washington in 2003 to research the FCC as part of a master's degree in Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. In his next role, Jonathan will be joining the Cheyenne Wyoming Daily Metropolitan Newspaper as an editor.