By MITCHELL FINK, MARCUS BARUM and CORKY SIEMASZKO With Mike Claffey, Michele McPhee, Lauren Rubin and Tom RafteryDAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

Friday, December 3th 1999, 2:11AM

The rap world was rocked yesterday by an outbreak of ferocious violence at a midtown nightclub that left a music mogul bleeding onstage and a rap star under arrest.

Grammy Award winner Jay-Z was charged with assault, police said.

Jay-Z allegedly sparked the wild brawl at the Kit Kat Klub, where Lance (Un) Rivera was stabbed and pounded with champagne bottles.

The spectacle Wednesday night was witnessed by a glittering crowd of music world elite, among them rap royalty Busta Rhymes and rappers Lil' Kim and Eve.

Jay-Z, who real name is Shawn Carter, wasn't at his Fort Lee, N.J., home when cops went looking for him during the day. But last night, he and his attorney showed up at Manhattan's Midtown South stationhouse.

"We're cooperating, and he didn't do anything, period," said the rapper's lawyer, Harvey Slovis.

But one witness told the Daily News that Jay-Z stabbed Rivera and police said they were being told the same thing.

"It looks like Jay-Z is the stabber," said one police source. "Then one of his buddies punched the other guy in the face or hit him with a bottle, causing a small laceration."

Another police source said 10 witnesses had identified Jay-Z as the assailant.

The night of mayhem began when Jay-Z performed at a "listening party" with rap impresario Sean (Puffy) Combs, model Tyson Beckford and Eve at Irving Plaza to celebrate the upcoming release of his new album, "Vol. 3 . . . Life and Times of S. Carter."

Jay-Z performed to a pounding beat with a deejay and background vocalists amid bright spotlights as the dancing crowd ate it up. He and 30 others then climbed into their sport-utility vehicles and caravaned uptown to the Kit Kat Klub on W. 43rd St.

A roiling party was under way there to celebrate the release of rapper Q-Tip's new album, "Amplified," with Arista Records honcho Clive Davis and Prince among the celebrities.

Wall-to-wall revelers decked out in hip-hop attire packed the cavernous venue, smoking cigars, drinking champagne and listening to piped-in music while waiting for Q-Tip to perform.

Jay-Z and his group arrived around midnight and went in, unannounced, through a celebrity entrance, police said. One witness said the slender rapper made a beeline through the crowd for the hulking Rivera.

"Words were exchanged with Un," said Arnold West, an independent record producer. "Then the thing just broke loose."

A member of Jay-Z's posse "hit Lance over the head with a bottle," West said. "And then Jay-Z stabbed him with a knife, 8- or 9-inch knife, he stabbed him in the back."

Rivera, who is 6-feet-2 and weighs 325 pounds, crashed to the stage, and members of Jay-Z's group continued punching and kicking him as revelers scattered to escape the violence, witnesses said.

Rivera friend Kory Jackson-Lopez, 29, was hit in the face with a bottle. Q-Tip was hit in the face as his bodyguards tried to shield him from the flying fists and shattering glass.

"They hustled Jay-Z out a back door," West said. "Clive Davis was right there, saw the whole thing."

Davis did not return telephone calls for comment, and other witnesses said they were not certain whether Jay-Z had wielded the knife. But when it was over, rapper Charli Baltimore was cradling the hulking Rivera in her arms and Q-Tip was crying onstage.

A source close to Jay-Z insisted the rapper was not involved in the melee. "Every time there's a fight and Jay is around, they say it was him," the source said.

Meanwhile, Rivera, 33, the head of Untertainment Records, was released from St. Vincent's Medical Center after being treated for stab wounds to his back and stomach.

Jay-Z, 29, is from the Marcy Houses in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. He won the Best Rap Album Grammy this year for his best-selling "Vol. 2 . . . Hard Knock Life," which revolved around a sample from the musical "Annie" and drew on his drug-dealing days.

Sources said Jay-Z and Rivera had been feuding. Jay-Z suspects Rivera's aides have been bootlegging his new album before its release, they said.

"They knew all about it. Jay-Z knew that someone was bootlegging the album, and they were on fire," said an insider.

Rivera, whose label is heavy on gangsta rappers, is also no stranger to violence. He was slain Brooklyn rapper Biggie Smalls' best friend and is reportedly a former crack dealer who served two years in prison for robbery.

At Rivera's townhouse in a gated community in Englewood, N.J., Jackson-Lopez said Rivera had been there and gone. He also declined to discuss the melee. "We don't know what happened," he said.

Summary: DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS The rap world was rocked yesterday by an outbreak of ferocious violence at a midtown nightclub that left a music mogul bleeding onstage and a rap star under arrest. Grammy Award winner Jay-Z was charged with assault, police said. Jay-Z allegedly sparked the wild brawl at the Kit Kat Klub, where Lance (Un) Rivera was stabbed and pounded with champagne bottles. The spectacle


Akamai Technologies Inc., the Cambridge company that runs a massive worldwide content delivery network, said Wednesday that it has completed its acquisition of Verivue, a privately-held Westford company that provides licensed content delivery network infrastructure services.

Akamai announced its plans to buy Verivue in mid November. Details of the purchase amount were not included in the company’s press release. Verivue has about 60 employees.

In a Wednesday press release, Akamai did say that it does not expect the acquisition of Verivue to materially impact results of operations in the current quarter. Accordingly, Akamai will not be updating fourth quarter 2012 guidance as a result of this acquisition.

The combination of the two companies’ technologies and teams is expected to help Akamai accelerate market availability of a comprehensive portfolio of operator CDN products.

According to Wikipedia, a CDN, or a content delivery network, is a large distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers in the Internet. The goal of a CDN is to serve content to end-users with high availability and high performance.

Summary: Akamai Technologies Inc., the Cambridge company that runs a massive worldwide content delivery network, said Wednesday that it has completed its acquisition of Verivue, a privately-held Westford company that provides licensed content delivery network infrastructure services. A purchase price has not been disclosed, but Akamai said that it does not expect the acquisition of Verivue to materially impact results of operations in the current quarter. Verivue has about 60 employees.


A federal judge in Boston said he will decide by the end of September whether to issue an injunction sought by TV station WCVB-TV against Aereo Inc., a company that retransmits WCVB programming over the Internet without permission. But US District Judge Nathaniel Gorton said he was predisposed to deny the TV station’s request.

Attorney James Smeallie, representing Hearst Stations Inc., which owns WCVB Channel 5, argued that Aereo is “freeloading” by transmitting the station’s shows without paying retransmission fees. But R. David Hosp, representing Aereo, said consumers have a right to use Aereo’s technology to make personal copies of the broadcasts, in the same way they have a right to use a digital video recorder in their homes.

Aereo is already facing a federal lawsuit in New York filed by major broadcasting networks. Some network executives have said that if that Aereo’s business model is held to be legal, cable companies could refuse to pay retransmission fees as well, costing the networks billions in revenues. Two networks, CBS and Fox, have threatened to halt over-the-air broadcasts and offer their shows only via cable and satellite systems if Aereo wins.

Summary: A federal judge in Boston said he will decide by the end of September whether to issue an injunction sought by TV station WCVB-TVagainst Aereo Inc.,a company that retransmits WCVB programming over the Internet without permission. But US District Judge Nathaniel Gorton said he was predisposed to deny the TV station’s request. Attorney James Smeallie, representing Hearst Stations Inc., which owns WCVB Channel 5, said argued that Aereo is “freeloading” by transmitting the station’s shows without paying retransmission fees. But R. David Hosp, representing Aereo, said consumers have a right to use Aereo’s technology to make personal copies of the broadcasts, in the same way they have a right to use a digital video recorder in their homes. Aereo is already facing a federal lawsuit in New York filed by major broadcasting networks.


'Full of wonderful things' … Grayson Perry's The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman. Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Guardian

"Part of my role as an artist," writes Grayson Perry in the catalogue to The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, "is similar to that of a shaman or witch doctor. I dress up, tell stories, give things meaning and make them a bit more significant." This is as true of Perry's relationship to his own art as it is of his enthusiasm for the things he has brought together for this show. The objects he has selected from the British Museum's collection are significant enough already, even when their original purpose and meaning is obscure – and even when they are as formally beautiful as the Boli figure, a great bovine clay and mud creature from Mali, or as spare and complex as the criss-crossed canes of a sailing chart for the Marshall Islands in the middle of the Pacific.

Shrines, "magick", pilgrimages, sexuality and gender, patina, texture and craftsmanship number among his themes. Each section could be a show in itself. We know, from Perry's written texts and from his own work, that he is at heart a commentator in everything he does. Perry snuck up on the British artworld – if a 6ft tall motorcycling Essex transvestite can sneak up on anything – during the 90s, and won the Turner prize in 2003 for his slightly wonky, decorated ceramic urns. Yet he won it as much as anything else for being Grayson Perry. His art and persona are inextricably linked, just like Joseph Beuys, one of his heroes. Perry is nowhere near as a good an artist as Beuys, but his clothes are more fun. The more public a figure he has become, the more confident Perry has become as an artist.

A show that riffs on craftsmanship, artistic give-and-take, reading and misreading across millennia and the persistence of the past in the present is a risky business. It is as much about Perry himself as it is about the anonymous makers and distant cultures of the artefacts he has brought together, which include Roman rings decorated with tiny erect phalluses, 17th-century Staffordshire plates, 20th-century Japanese photographs of drag kings and queens, and a Mesopotamian relief of a couple in bed.

The show is full of wonderful things. His own iron sculptures of male and female pilgrims (with their swag of sewing machines, mobile phone necklaces, boomboxes and babies) have an ethnographic look, and are a fitting sort of homeless pastiche. His reworking of a 16th-century Rhineland jug, with the original's oak leaves entwined with his riffs on second world war imagery, is a lively play on origins and history. Yet his Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, a big iron coffin ship and the centrepiece of the exhibition, feels comparatively laboured as well as overladen with its cargo of cross-cultural references and glass phials of blood, sweat and tears.

I also find the shop full of Perry-designed merchandise at the end of the show an undignified comedown. But Perry largely pulls it off. Artists often make good curators: they have more at stake than most career professionals. I could have done with fewer of Perry's own works, and less of Alan Measles, however fundamental this teddy bear is to Perry's iconography. But it is a useful prop, a transitional object in Perry's personal and artistic journey.

Summary: Roman rings, Staffordshire plates, Japanese photographs – Perry's show is as much about himself as it is about the artefacts he has brought together, writes Adrian Searle


Fire, what fire?: Joel Sternfeld's Citigroup prize-nominated McLean, Virginia

I don't know if God much cares for photography. He's probably seen too much. For a long time, Joel Sternfeld said he thought that God was looking out for the young and desperate photographer - how else to explain the remarkable and bizarre incidents that came Sternfeld's way as he wandered America? A house is on fire, blazing furiously. The fire ladder is poised over the roof; it is a desperate moment. How is it, then, that one of the crew can take time out to wander across a field to buy a pumpkin from the farm store? One can only ask, too, how Sternfeld got there. Another day, he found himself on a country road where a renegade elephant, escaped from the circus, collapsed in the road from heat exhaustion, where it is now being hosed down. Does God have a hand in the world's absurdity?

Sternfeld, a New Yorker, is one of the four shortlisted photographers in the eighth Citigroup photography prize, which opens today at London's Photographers' Gallery. The £20,000 winner is announced on March 4. Sternfeld is one of two photographers of modern, benighted America here. The other is Robert Adams. The tenor and style of their images could not be more different. Adams's small, precise, black-and-white images, taken in the 1960s and 70s, are of moments where nothing much is happening. A small cloud floats over the housing tracts covering the prairie. Pike's Peak looms in the distance, disappearing into the heat-haze, just as the beauty of the west is disappearing. Perhaps it has already gone. Adams's photographs make you think of Harry Dean Stanton in Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas, walking into the desert till all sign of human habitation has disappeared.

There are few people in Adams's photographs. Some blurry figures in a drugstore aisle, a girl waiting on the street, but their signs are everywhere. The station wagon is in the porch, the living room light has gone on at dusk. The field is ploughed, headlights glare. These are little images of big spaces and bigger regrets. You have to get up close to Adams's images, as though he wanted us to get intimate with the banal architectures of human indifference, the roadkilled rabbit pounded flat into the tarmac. There is something painful even in the absolute precision of the tonal gradations of his photographs.

Sternfeld's images, on the other hand, are frequently funny, but there's often something hollow under the laugh. For a long time, he photographed arresting accidental moments that begged a bigger narrative. A bunch of folks go sightseeing at a big concrete dam. They lean over the sill. What grabbed Sternfeld's attention was the collapsible playpen parked behind them, the kid in it. Why here? A guy sits on a wall in his driveway, with a girl we take to be his daughter beside him. He's wearing shorts, which are a bit too tight. His legs are open and the creases at his crotch look - inescapably - like a lewd cartoon vagina. The photographer can't have arranged that, surely, nor the cigar between his fingers, another somehow worrying detail. But maybe its just a smoke. Everything about the image is normal, but in Sternfeld's work normal is decidedly unsettling. More recently he has been photo-graphing New York from a disused and overgrown elevated railway line that runs through Manhattan. Spring evenings between the buildings, wildflowers blooming on the tracks, snowy nights. It looks like an alpine path. I love such places. It is easy to see their appeal for the photographer. These large, panoramic, highly detailed colour images make a nice counterpoint to Adams. They approach their subjects in different ways, and with different sensibilities, but they seem to me to be saying something similar about America.

South African David Goldblatt is the photo-documentarist of apartheid. Born in 1930, Goldblatt is the oldest here. Saying that he wanted his photographs to "probe" the world he lives in, Goldblatt has done much more than photograph the iniquities of an obscene and disgusting regime. His harsh black-and-white images, taken over the past 40 years, are often accompanied by long descriptive titles. You look, you read, you look again: at a bewildered black kid with both arms in plaster, the day after a police interrogation; at a bunch of surly white guys on horseback, an honour guard for National Party leader Hendrick Verwoerd; a defeated black farmer whose home has been razed. I ask myself why the white people always look so ugly, smug, stupid or nasty. Even childhood innocence, where Goldblatt finds it, looks culpable.

Not all Goldblatt's images are so easily read, not all his black subjects stoical or resigned or downtrodden or miserable, though inevitably that was exactly what they were. He has a good eye for what was under his nose 24 hours a day, but sometimes his images are a bit arty. At times it seems he verges on sentimentality, but his work in the apartheid era was utterly neccessary, truthful and extremely powerful. His more recent images - large-scale, printed in colour and hung unframed, seem physically and psychologically more relaxed than his earlier, harder, more condensed black-and-white images. This does not mean that these are somehow less remorseless images - they show shacks under the pylons, with the corporate towers of Johannesburg on the far side of a wasteland; a ramshackle market in the shadow of an overpass, lives which are still far from easy.

There is a thread connecting Goldblatt, Adams and Sternfeld. It is difficult to see where the only British shortlisted photographer, Peter Fraser, fits in. Maybe there is no reason why he should. He takes colour pictures of disregarded details from the world about him. These are lusciously printed and fill their frames. Some are almost abstract: what appears to be a red car bonnet, covered in some viscous substance that looks alarmingly like congealed blood. The image could also be read as a photographic version of a sloppy, if bravura, colour-field painting, except for one detail. Stuck in this glutinous slick is a small aerial seed, whose delicate filaments catch the light. Fraser makes big pictures of little things. A discarded styrofoam cup, which someone has fiddled with and pierced with cocktail sticks and which he found on a shelf, dramatised by a shaft of Welsh sunlight; a plastic carboy, cut open and containing some blue liquid; the stump of a tree surrounded by the chips and shards of its own destruction.

They're fine, adept and clever, fascinating in their way, but they aren't good enough. Without knowing quite why, I find them a bit worthy. How shortlists are arrived at is a mysterious process. How winners are chosen is mysterious too. I could look at the earlier Sternfelds for a long time. I recognise the lament in Adams's highly crafted work and understand the necessity of Goldblatt's achievement. I'd like Sternfeld to win - maybe God knows why.

· The Citigroup photography prize 2004 is at the Photographers' Gallery, London WC2, until March 28. Details: 020-7831 1772.

Summary: The outstanding artist in the new Citigroup photography prize show is also the luckiest. How else could he have captured this firefighter taking time out to buy fruit? By Adrian Searle.


Twenty years ago the introduction of the AppleMac changed computing for ever. The Mac broke new ground because it was powerful, intuitive and user-friendly. But, above all, people took to them because they were cute.

The bizarre thing is how the power and ubiquity of computers has developed exponentially, while the language used to operate them remains grounded in the past. All those funny little icons and accompanying repertoire of bloops and quacks - it's so 1984. This irony is central to the work of Jodi (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans), a Dutch duo renowned for their creative misuse of computers. The pair turn the main gallery at Fact into a gigantic, animated shrine to 20 years of the Mac. The walls pop and quiver with randomly generated menus and dialogue boxes, icons scoot aimlessly, and the system complains with a babble of electronic noise that sounds like squeaky toys being massacred in a rifle range.

At the back, a row of cubby-holes pays homage to the days when the only people who had fun with computers were programmers; it includes an example of an emulation programme that nostalgic nerds use to make their machines run like the ancient ZX Spectrums they started out on. In a second gallery, Jodi have established a disorientating white labyrinth through which the visitor passes as if trapped in a computer game. The walls are studded with peepholes through which you can witness a simulation of a cyborg killing machine shooting itself in the foot. It's perplexing but immaculately presented: proof that geek art has perhaps come of age.

· Until September 5. Details: 0151-707 4450.

Summary: , Fact, Liverpool


New London Architecture, or NLA as it wishes to be known, the first ever permanent exhibition space dedicated to the future of the city's architecture, was due to open on July 7 with a party at its home in London's Bloomsbury. This is the old, but newly revamped, Building Centre in Store Street, close to Tavistock Place, where a number 30 bus was blown up that morning killing and wounding passengers.

"I still have mixed thoughts about our decision to cancel the opening that evening," says Peter Murray, NLA's founding curator over breakfast in Smithfield, a part of London ravaged by bombs and rockets during the Blitz. "On the one hand it might easily have been seen as bad taste. On the other, we would have been waving a flag for London, saying, in effect, that this is truly one of those cities that can't be held back; it'll always rise from ashes, stronger and richer in every sense, every time." Grace and good manners won the evening, of course; the official opening now takes place tomorrow.

Murray is right, though. History proves how London has risen, a crowing cockney phoenix, time and again after fire, plague, riots, war, floods and acts of terrorism. Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni, razed the city to the ground a few years after its foundation by the Romans. Since then any number of hostile regimes, "acts of God" and misanthropes have had a go at taking London out; they have all failed.

What cannot be in doubt is that London is booming, not from the report of bombs, but economically. Rather endearingly, politicians, many fresh to the city, continue to describe London as "a world-class city", as if, somehow, it was ever anything less. If I was to tell you that just one of the new architectural developments planned for an unfashionable quarter of the city will occupy a greater space than the entire and vast ancient Khmer temple complex of Angkor Wat, Cambodia, you might begin to see the reasoning behind NLA and the need for it.

This development, by the way, is at Cricklewood, north-west London, to the south of the bad-tempered North Circular Road and alongside the first of London's giant shopping malls, Brent Cross. The developers, Multiplex, are Australian: it is clearly worth doing business halfway around the world to get a slice of London's enormous pie. The architects charged with planning the scheme are Allies and Morrison, civilised chaps whose appointment here reflects a gradual change in such mega-developments; these might not be the Unesco World Heritage Sites of the future, yet they are, slowly, becoming more than out-of-place bully boys in the architectural scheme of things. That this is just one of no fewer than 31 major developments planned, or in the planning process, for London identified by Murray and shown in NLA's debut exhibition, The Changing Face of London, proves, again and again, the need for the new architecture centre.

The core of NLA, which you see as you walk through the revolving doors on Store Street, is a large-scale and brightly coloured three-dimensional map of a huge swathe of London's ever-expanding centre, from London City Airport in the east to Shepherd's Bush in the west, made by Pipers, a firm of brilliant architectural model-makers with a real passion for, and understanding of, the way London is changing. Nick McKeogh, director of Pipers, is co-founder and manager of NLA.

The map shows you exactly where these 31 major new developments are, all £100bn worth of them, including the 2012 Lea Valley Olympic Park. In these developments alone, if you could only study the map with a clairvoyant's magnifying glass, you are looking at some 400,000 new homes, around 8m square feet of new offices (four Empire State Buildings' worth), and Mammon only knows how many accessible, vibrant, sustainable, identical 24-hour chain cafes delivering your choice of fat-filled muffins and hot, frothy, muddy-milk drinks.

Tasteful or not, and like it or not, all this is heading London's way over the next 20 years as the population rises by a predicted 700,000. Many existing Londoners will continue to abandon the city as many new ones, from all over the world, flock in to have a go at making a quid or two before themselves heading elsewhere. Here is a monumental city in the making for an increasingly transient population who will always love this overpriced, poorly serviced, disco-noisy, increasingly rude and, as always, criminal capital. London has been most of these things for most of its history, although architects have long endeavoured to give the city the grace and imagination those who have commissioned them have tended to lack in their quest for money above all else.

Murray and McKeogh have long wanted to create an architecture centre for London, as have many others, who have never quite understood why if Paris and Havana have had such places for many years, this constantly changing megalopolis has lacked one. Perhaps because London is such an unplanned city, the very idea of trying to see it as a whole, and to contain it somehow in the imagination, has been against its own wilful grain. However, there have also been times when organisations that have been in a position to help with the creation of such a centre, such as the Arts Council of England, has turned its back on London, and continued to bang on about regenerating "the regions", wherever they are, as if London's phenomenal growth has been something to ignore.

There is not, nor will there be, a shortage of pure architectural exhibitions in London. The RIBA Gallery, the V&A, the Hayward Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts and the up-and-coming Architecture Foundation gallery designed by Zaha Hadid are just some of the venues sporting shows celebrating, and examining, the history and art of architecture. What NLA aims to do is something simple and very necessary: to explain to Londoners, and to at least some of the city's 14 million tourists (the number expected through 2005), what is happening to London in terms of architectural development, who is behind it, and why.

Open to the public free of charge, six days a week, NLA will be a place, Murray hopes, where people feel they can get a grip on what seem to be so many secret, or simply obscure, developments and begin to feel able to contribute something to the debates.

"Londoners quite rightly fear that new developments might be just more big, shiny offices remote from their lives," says Murray. "Justifiably, they find talk of the Thames gateway baffling: where is it, what is it and how will it be any different, or any better, than what has gone before? There is an enormous amount of new jargon surrounding new developments; we want people to be able to see, as clearly as we can manage on what is a limited budget, what the jargon might hide, or reveal, so they can make up their own minds while joining in the debate of what we should be building, who those buildings might be serving, and what they might look and feel like."

The Changing Face of London is just the first of a number of exhibitions planned around the Pipers' model of the city at NLA over the next year. Let's hope it opens with the right sort of bang next week; London has waited long enough for this modest, spirited and intelligent attempt to let us all see what is happening to the physique of the city, even before its gym-pumped new architecture - good, bad, or indifferent - is let loose on us all.

· New London Architecture is at the Building Centre, 26 Store Street, London WC1. Details: 020-7692 4000. guardian.co.uk/glancey

Summary: What will London look like with another £100bn-worth of new buildings? Jonathan Glancey visits the new architecture gallery that reveals all.


The title of this solo acoustic debut album from the singer-guitarist of the storied Seattle grunge outliers Melvins — a play on “This Machine Kills Fascists,” the slogan that protest balladeer Woody Guthrie famously painted on his guitar in 1941 — immediately indicates that the enigmatic King Buzzo hasn’t taken pains to extract his tongue from his cheek. There’s no whiff of the near-piety that saturated so many episodes of “MTV Unplugged.” Instead, Osborne plies his customary snarl, obstreperous lyrics, and bespoke riffs — sometimes lightly altered with effects, but bone-stark otherwise — on crabby yarns like “Rough Democracy,” “Everything’s Easy for You,” “The Blithering Idiot,” and “Useless King of the Punks.” Pithy where Melvins might have sprawled, Osborne’s solo songs still amount to M-80s lobbed at convention with reckless abandon and cockeyed aim. (Out now)

Buzz Osborne performs July 10 at Brighton Music Hall.

Summary: Armed only with an acoustic guitar and his customary anarchic attitude, Melvins leader Buzz Osborne goes it alone as a unconventional troubadour.


(REUTERS) – The U.S. Justice Department is investigating allegations that an employee of HSBC Holdings leaked confidential client information to a major hedge fund, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people with knowledge of the matter.

The alleged leak is believed to have taken place in March 2010, when HSBC was advising British insurer Prudential on a major acquisition and was working on a related multibillion-dollar currency transaction, the Journal reported.

HSBC helped Prudential sell billions of pounds and buy billions of dollars to finance the insurer’s planned $35 billion acquisition of American International Group Inc’s Asian life-insurance unit, the Journal said.

A senior HSBC trader allegedly alerted a trader at hedge fund Moore Capital Management, a prominent New York hedge fund founded by investor Louis Bacon, about the impending transaction, the Journal said.

HSBC was not available to comment.

The probe is part of a broader investigation into currency market manipulation involving the British bank, as well as JPMorgan Chase & Co, Citigroup Inc, UBS AG and others.

U.S., Swiss and British civil authorities have already fined six banks, including HSBC, $4.3 billion for failing to stop traders from trying to manipulate the largely unregulated $5-trillion-a-day foreign exchange market.

U.S. prosecutors will travel to London in the coming weeks to interview traders, the latest sign that authorities are closer to filing criminal charges stemming from the long-running probe, Reuters reported on Tuesday.

Summary: Trader allegedly alerted a hedge fund about an impending transaction.


02/03/2015 AT 02:40 PM EST

Economist and international party boy Dominique Strauss-Kahn is

of "aggravated pimping in an organized group."

The former managing director of the International Monetary Fund, 65, lost his high-paying, high-powered job after a

. Strauss-Kahn was accused of accosting a hotel maid and gang-raping a prostitute on a trip to New York.

The French economist denied the allegations, and they were eventually dropped. But an investigation into an alleged prostitution ring in France led to the pimping charges in May 2011.

, Strauss-Kahn is charged with "aggravated procurement in a group" (aka pimping). French authorities claim he organized parties where women were reportedly paid to have sex with businessmen.

Known for his wild ways – he's been called the "king of the party" and has admitted to partaking in orgies – Strauss-Kahn denies there was any wrongdoing and claims he didn't organize the parties and didn't know women were being paid for sex.

"I long thought that I could lead my life as I wanted â¦ And that includes free behavior between consenting adults. There are numerous parties that exist like this in Paris, and you would be surprised to encounter certain people,"

quoted him saying in 2012. "I was naive."

Strauss-Kahn is expected to appear in a Paris court on Feb. 10. He could face up to 10 years in prison if convicted.

Summary: The former IMF director could face up to 10 years in prison if convicted of participating in a prostitution ring


02/25/2015 AT 07:45 PM EST

and Chad Littlefield's families praised Tuesday's

guilty of their murders, his lawyer tells PEOPLE he plans to appeal.

Routh, 27, had admitted to fatally shooting the famed Navy SEAL and his friend Littlefield at a Texas gun range on Feb. 2, 2013, and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. During his capital murder trial, which began Feb. 11, his lawyer, J. Warren St. John, sought to prove that the former Marine was insane at the time of the murders.

"We are disappointed in the verdict," he tells PEOPLE. "Mr. Routh is still suffering from schizophrenia. He had a belief in his mind that day. He believed that they were going to kill him. It was a real belief that he had. We're disappointed the jury didn't give that any consideration. They dismissed that."

Routh was sentenced to life in prison without parole, but "he;s going to appeal it this week," St. John says. "I am going to file it this week."

St. John says he thinks Kyle's "notoriety" hurt his client's case.

the movie based on Kyle's 2012 bestselling autobiography, became one of the biggest box office smashes of all time, earning more than $400,000,000 worldwide since its Jan.16 opening. The Clint Eastwood-directed film also garnered six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Bradley Cooper, who plays the man known as the most deadly sniper in U.S. history. (The movie won an Oscar for Best Sound Editing.)

Even though jurors were able to watch the Oscars on Sunday night, St. John says, "I don't think the Oscars had anything to do with it. It was Mr. Kyle's notoriety and all the things he accomplished. It was his reputation. If he was Joe average on the street, it might have turned out differently. They didn't know Chris Kyle, but they think they did.â

On Wednesday morning, Kyle's widow,

thanked the jurors who found Routh guilty.

"God Bless the Jury And good people of Stephenville, Texas!!" she wrote on

Summary: The lawyer for the former Marine found guilty of killing Chris Kyle calls the trial "disappointing"


You can glean a lot from a gearshift.

Step into the Volvo XC90 T8 sport utility vehicle and your eye settles on a crystalline nub perched between the front seats. This icy bauble, held in a matte aluminium surround, has no corollary in car-dom. Its equivalent may only exist in some frigid, as-yet-unfilmed Ridley Scott dystopia, where high-cheekboned villains use it to control geothermally warmed villain incubators. It is heavy equipment.

And yet all is light in the new XC90, overhauled for the first time since its introduction in 2002. The gearshift is hand-blown by Swedish studio Orrefors, and while such an item may have ranked relatively low on Volvo engineers’ priority list, it is one of many cool, considered details that distance the XC90 – physically and philosophically – from such humourless targets as the Audi Q7, Mercedes-Benz ML and BMW X5.

As the first all-new Volvo to emerge since the Swedish brand’s purchase by Zhejiang Geely Holding Group in 2010, the XC90 has benefited from a Middle Kingdom-size R&D budget. So festooned is the SUV with clever safety technology, innovative powertrain features and wondrous materials that it can feel like a concept car that slipped the leash – for both good and ill.

What the XC90 is, unambiguously, is large. Keep the kettle boiling during a walk-around; at 195 inches (495cm) long and 84 inches wide, it is 5 inches longer and a full 10 inches broader than its predecessor. It may be the first imperious Volvo, all high hood line and ample shoulders, with nary a flare or upsweep from nose to tail. The XC90 could wear a Bentley grille and no one would blink – as much an achievement as it is a demerit.

Indeed, under Thomas Ingenlath, Volvo has assembled one of the most inventive design departments in the business, but the sharper pencils were holstered here. This is the most upright, stolid Volvo since the bricklike GL station wagons of the 1970s and ‘80s. The XC90 wasn’t whittled or extruded so much as hacked from a glacier.

Clambering into the cabin reveals the rewards, though, for thinking inside the slightly contoured box. With second and two-seat third rows folded, the XC90 yields 85 cubic-feet of cargo room, 5cu-ft more than the Mercedes ML and a considerable 12.5cu-ft more than the Audi Q7. And there’s light. Lots of it. A panoramic roof is standard equipment. Everywhere the eye settles is an invitation to serenity-now: a frameless rearview mirror is an infinity pool of glass; audio knobs float in matte birch veneer. It’s the HMS Cool Scandinavia, but should you forget your SUV’s provenance, reference the thumbprint-size Swedish flag stitched in the front passenger’s seat back.

You can almost smell the deconstructed gravlax and dill foam.

Though the interior may seem progressive, the truly avant-garde stuff is hidden from view. This is the first Volvo to employ a new modular platform architecture that will underpin eight more cars from the brand in the next four years – a strategy that, among other things, reduces development time for those vehicles.

Under the SUV’s capacious hood, meanwhile, is yet more innovative thinking: a 2-litre four-cylinder gasoline engine fitted with a supercharger for instant low-end power, which seamlessly cedes to a turbocharger at 3,500rpm for mid-range thrust. Pin the throttle and the response – if not the sound, which recalls a Dyson upright at full suck – is more akin to that of a turbocharged V6, sending the base T6 model to 62mph (100km/h) in a manufacturer-estimated 6.5 seconds.

The acceleration is all the more remarkable given the T6’s 4,621lb (2,100kg) curb weight, a number that feels quite remote when the car is being shovelled into a corner. In Dynamic mode, which tightens suspension, throttle and steering response, the T6 feels as tossable as much smaller SUVs. Tossability is not an essential family-car trait, but it’s heartening to know Volvo valued it.

For all its on-road virtues, the T6 does not represent this rebounding marque’s brave new era. With an electric motor mounted at the rear axle and a plug port ahead of the driver door, the XC90 T8 is Volvo’s pace car. The company has sold plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) in Europe since 2012, but the XC90 T8 is its first PHEV to go global. (A turbodiesel model, the D5, is limited to European markets.) And with a combined 400 horsepower, the T8 bludgeons its way to 62mph in 5.9 seconds. Final figures are pending, but Volvo expects the PHEV to return a combined gasoline-electric mpg equivalent of 59 in the US. No Audi Q7 turbodiesel or Mercedes ML350 Bluetec is matching that.

Approach the same corners negotiated earlier in the T6, though, and the T8 – burdened by 550lbs of electric wizardry – buries its nose. Any gains in straight-line speed are surrendered in the twists.

But did we mention this is a seven-seat, all-wheel-drive luxury SUV? The XC90 is brimming with passive safety features, head-up displays, active lane-departure correction, a smattering of cameras and a vertically oriented multimedia screen to control them all. Sensus, as the housed suite of infotainment features is called, processes touch commands with speed and precision to match the tablets and smartphones that inspired its design. Compared to the spectacular touchscreen-less thinking in Audi’s TT sports coupe, though, which comes to the Q7 for 2016, Sensus feels like the greatest articulation of what has been, not of what may be.

And yet, $100,000 Range Rovers would roll over in the mud to own anything so advanced. The XC90 is a terribly premium product, the kind that could draw thousands of customers out of Germans’ and even Britons’ showrooms. For once a Volvo is not the contrarian choice, but the sensible one.

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Summary: The overhauled SUV possesses the grandeur of vehicles twice its price, as well as a cool nonconformist streak.


On April 14, 2011 Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky interviewed Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, in Mountain View, Calif., at an event sponsored by the Commonwealth Club of California. The chairman danced around the most prominent item on his agenda, the proposed acquisition of T-Mobile by AT&T. He also discussed spectrum re-allocation, his pragmatic approach, and what it was like being a law school classmate of President Obama. An unedited transcript follows, along with a video of the event.

ADAM LASHINSKY: Good evening, and welcome to our Commonwealth Club’s Silicon Valley program, brought to you from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

I’m Adam Lashinsky, Senior Editor at Large at Fortune Magazine. It is my pleasure to introduce this evening Julius Genachowski, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

Julius Genachowski brings a diverse background to his leadership of the FCC. He studied history at Columbia College of Columbia University, where he dabbled in journalism as the editor of the Columbia Daily Spectator. He decided not to pursue a career in journalism, undoubtedly wisely, and instead studied law at Harvard Law School, where he was the notes editor under a later notable editor of the review, named Barack Obama, who graduated from Harvard Law School the same year.

He served several distinguished clerkships following law school, including for the honorable Abner J. Mikvah on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit, as well as for two Supreme Court justices, William Brennan and David Souter. He served on the select committee investigating the Iran-Contra affair in the U.S. House of Representatives, and later was Chief Council to the FCC.

He then became one of you — he worked in the technology industry for IAC Interactive Corp. IACI , and served on the boards of Expedia EXPE , Hotels.com, and Ticketmaster. He became a venture capitalist, founding a firm called Rock Creek Ventures, during which time he was on the board of several startups, including Motley Fool.

He currently serves on the board of Common Sense Media, a leading organization seeking to improve the media lives of children and their families. [Adam Lashinsky writes on April 27: Genachowski left the Common Sense board when he joined the government.] And in case there are any problems tonight, it is comforting to know that in college he was an EMT at Columbia.

Please join me in welcoming Julius Genachowski. (Applause.)

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: Gavels. It’s impressive, isn’t it, that gavel? You wield it well.

ADAM LASHINSKY: Thank you. It’s my second time wielding the gavel. You get better as you go along.

So, I’m going to start, Julius, by throwing you a softball, by making an observation to you — two observations. Recently, the Wall Street Journal editorial page said of a rulemaking process at the FCC, referring to your boss, President Obama — excuse me, referring to President Obama, “Mr. Obama insists that he’s focused on economic growth and innovation. He could do that goal a favor by letting Congress override his politically driven FCC.” That’s one comment.

It’s also been observed to me that friends of yours in the progressive or consumer activist community feel that you have not been aggressive enough in pursuing their agenda.

So, I would submit to you that if you are being attacked by consumer advocates on one hand, and by the Wall Street Journal editorial page on the other hand, that you must be doing something right.

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: Well, I’m not sure how to respond to that, other than to say, look, the area that the FCC operates in, the area of communications, technology, our information infrastructure, it’s just so important to our economic health, to our global competitiveness. The issues are incredibly challenging as technology is changing so fast, the markets are changing so fast. We’re competing against countries around the world. It’s really important that the FCC do what we have been trying to do, which is focus on the facts, the data, the technology, the real challenges and what we can do to help support and drive the kind of innovation that we see here in this part of the country.

ADAM LASHINSKY: So, I want to suggest to people that we keep in mind that one of the first things you said was about the facts and the data. You’ve been accused of, and I think you’ve acknowledged, being a pragmatist in your role as the FCC chairman. Let’s come back to that, let’s jump right into policy, and let’s tackle some of the big issues that the FCC is dealing with. Why don’t you start by explaining to everybody what the National Broadband Plan is, please?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: Sure. The broadband, of course, is high speed Internet. It’s this incredible platform. People around here know it well: wired and wireless. That’s increasingly becoming the main platform for economic activity in the United States, and very quickly around the world, for driving solutions to some very hard national challenges like education and health care and energy and public safety.

We are not where we should be as a country when it comes to our broadband infrastructure. We can get into some of that if you’d like. We’ve never, until we did this plan, looked at this the way a company would, and say, what are our goals, what are the challenges, how are we going to get there?

And that’s what we did with the National Broadband plan, and we completed it about a little over a year ago, and we’ve been hard at work implementing its key recommendations. The fundamental goal is to make sure that we harness the opportunities of high-speed Internet for our economy, and for driving innovation and solutions to the issues I mentioned.

ADAM LASHINSKY: Yeah, so please discuss a couple or three of the planks in the platform, and I’m curious — we’re far, far away from Washington here — for you to explain the difference between things that the FCC can do on its own versus things that it needs Congressional help to do.

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: First, let me lay out something that kind of speaks to the overall challenge. There’s an organization called ITIF that did a study of 40 industrial countries, ranking each of the countries on the basis of their competitiveness and innovative capacity. And it looked at a relatively small number of metrics with broadband-related metrics, the deployment and adoption of high-speed Internet as key metrics.

The study found that the U.S., on a snapshot basis, was sixth out of 40; it’s interesting to see people’s reaction to that. A lot of people have heard of the OECD numbers that rank the U.S. 16th or 17th when it comes to broadband. This ranked the U.S. sixth. To some people, after they hear the other numbers, they say, well, that’s a relief, it’s not good enough, we need to be number one, and it’s certainly disappointing not to be on the medal podium.

But in any event, that’s not what was most important about the study. The study then looked at each of the countries and measured the rate of change of each of the metrics, and all the countries were improving, so it was measuring rate of improvement. On that basis, it ranked the U.S. 40th out of 40, and that tells us that there’s a problem, that the country isn’t moving as fast as it should when it comes to high-speed Internet.

We identified a number of issues in the plan, but I’ll tell you the main ones, and we can jump into any of them. One is our mobile broadband infrastructure. So, we’re seeing just incredible innovation and opportunity around mobile broadband. Everything that we see around smartphones and tablets and machine-to-machine devices relies on an infrastructure that we can’t see, an invisible infrastructure, our airwaves, our spectrum, which is a central responsibility of the FCC.

Here’s the problem: The demand for use of spectrum from all of these devices is dramatically exceeding the supply of spectrum, and we need to tackle that challenge and free up more spectrum for mobile broadband, and do other things to make sure that we can fully seize the opportunities of mobile broadband. We can come back and talk about that, but that’s one major thing.

A second is we have a whole series of programs designed to accomplish the kind of universal service that we want for broadband, because we want every American, wherever they live, every business, wherever it is, to have access to and to use high-speed Internet service. The statistics are not where they should be. About 25 million Americans live in parts of the country that have no broadband access. Over 100 million Americans don’t subscribe when they could. So, our broadband adoption rate is 67% in the U.S. — 67%. That compares to, say, 90% for Singapore.

We have universal service programs. We spend about $9 billion a year as a country through programs that the FCC oversees. Those programs, by law and rule, are still focused on universalizing telephone service.

ADAM LASHINSKY: Which you’ve said is a 20th century issue, not a 21st century issue.

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: So, we need to transform 20th century rules that focus on yesterday’s communications infrastructure, into smart, efficient programs that support our 21st century communications infrastructure broadband.

So, why don’t I stop there? Those are two of the central issues that we identified in the broadband plan.

ADAM LASHINSKY: Sure. So, the first part is part of the spectrum issue, which we’re going to come back to and spend a significant amount of time on. It’s one of your major initiatives. But what do we do about — where is the problem on this telephone versus broadband issue?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: Sure. Well, the program continues to wake up every day and fund and support old telephone service. It’s related to another set of policies and practices called inter-carrier compensation, and not worth going into the details other than to say we still kind of operate in the sort of payment system and the regulatory structure around communications based on old telephone service that assumed long-distance and local companies and money moving back and forth through that old system.

We need to update that for broadband. What’s happening now is the system is producing, in many cases, perverse incentives. It’s deterring some companies from upgrading their networks to digital IP networks, and the program has also become wasteful and inefficient. There are parts of the country that are receiving more money than makes sense under this program. Multiple companies are being funded in the same area. There are some parts of the country that are receiving nothing at all.

We need to bring efficiency to the program. We need to move to models for distribution of these funds that are based on basic market ideas. Reverse auctions is an idea, have people come and bid to serve a local area for broadband. So, it’s a very complex set of rules and policies.

The goals are simple: Where economics won’t support broadband infrastructure, which is in typically our least populated areas, let’s have efficient public-private partnerships that include those areas.

Similarly, on adoption, where it makes sense to have government programs that help move the needle on the adoption rate, let’s do that in a smart way.

We’re looking at all of those, and we’re looking at the parts of the program that also help schools connect to the Internet, and help health care facilities connect to the Internet.

ADAM LASHINSKY: From your comments — other than it sounds like maybe some companies are making money from the system the way it is, and making the system work better might make it more difficult to have them make money — other than that, this sounds like a technocratic problem that we should be able to study, analyze, come up with a solution, and make it happen. So, why are we looking at it instead of doing it?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: Well, we are doing it, but let me tell you why I think — a lens through which to look at some of these problems that helps explain the challenges and what we need to overcome to make some of these changes.

A lot of people here are probably familiar with a book called The Innovator’s Dilemma. It’s a Clayton Christensen book that looks at why market-leading companies can have a very hard time responding to disruptive technologies and disruptive competitors.

And the basic thesis is that as a market-leading company you develop practices, dependencies, on the existing ways of doing business that even when you know what you should do from a strategic perspective to deal with new technologies and competitors, it can be very hard, because you’re not operating on a blank slate. You have to make moves with employees, technologies, business practices, et cetera.

Well that’s a pretty good lens through which to look at the U.S. in this area.

ADAM LASHINSKY: You’re comparing the United States to an older, more mature company.

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: The U.S. was the market leader in the global economy in the 20th century. We still are. We’re facing disruptive new technologies like high-speed Internet and broadband, disruptive new competitors in Asia and other parts of the world.

We know in some areas what we need to do. We’ll come and talk about spectrum, we just talked about universal service, but we don’t have the easy ability to draw on a whiteboard and say, ‘Well, tomorrow we’re going to start putting in place the new strategy,’ because, like a market-leading company, we have existing dependencies, processes, companies that are the consequences of our success.

So, in the universal service area, we know what an efficient smart program to support universal broadband service would look like. To transition on a dime to that new program would be very disruptive to existing companies that employ people, that rely on the existing system, and that also often have an interest in slowing down these processes.

So, from both a substantive and a political basis, we have to tackle all these innovator’s dilemma challenges, not ignore the fact that we have these challenges, and in fact recognizes that a lot of these challenges come from our successes in the 20th century, but we still have to make the changes.

ADAM LASHINSKY: Okay, so you’re making good sense about what the problem is. So, is it a combination of FCC rulemaking and congressional action to make that happen?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: It depends on the area. Our governing statute is the Communications Act. In many ways, it’s a flexible instrument that gives us the flexibility to address communications issues, even as technology and markets change. In some other areas it doesn’t. In the universal service area we have the authority that we need to make the changes in the program, and we’re deep into a process, and we’re going to keep working at it, and we think over the next few months we’ll be able to significantly reform this program, put it on a smart, healthy, efficient footing.

In the spectrum area, there are some areas where we have the authority under the statute to do what we need to do. There are other areas where we need congressional legislation.

ADAM LASHINSKY: So, on universal service I will play the role of venture capitalist, and ask you to play the role of a startup company in my portfolio. I’m your investor. When are you going to have this product ready for the market? You said in a few months you’ll have some action, but when will we have a satisfactory product?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: Well, we have said to all the companies and stakeholders involved in this — and we actually did this in an unprecedented way at the Commission — all five FCC commissioners did a joint blog to tell all the stakeholders with an interest in universal service programs to come to the table now, roll up their sleeves with us on these hard issues, focus with us on facts and data and the real problems, and to be on a track with us, because the train’s moving with or without them, to tackle this — to be ready to tackle this as early as August.

ADAM LASHINSKY: So, that means to have discussions by August, or —

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: The discussions are now. The way the process works at the FCC is it’s generally a two-stage process where you propose a direction, there is public comment, and then the FCC acts. We have already issued what we call our notice of proposed rulemaking, and we’re now — our staff at the FCC is in the process of reviewing the record, engaging with stakeholders, and we’re on this summer track that I mentioned.

ADAM LASHINSKY: Okay. I want to remind everybody that you have question cards, and the questions are piling in. I’m not avoiding the AT&T/T-Mobile issue, we’re going to come to it, and perhaps more appropriately, you all are going to come to that. I think 90% of the cards so far — well, so I’ll just ask you that 17 times towards the end of the interview.

This spectrum reallocation issue is very confusing, it’s very wonky, yet it’s very important. So, let’s spend a few minutes on it, please. Explain to us what’s at stake, what needs to get fixed, and what your crystal ball is on how it will get fixed.

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: So, we have this spectrum gap that I mention. The demand from smartphones, tablets, is rapidly exceeding supply, and when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. If you think about a smartphone as compared to the old feature phones that people had — I’m guessing everyone in this room is a smartphone person — well, we know intuitively that those phones and the web access that they have are putting much more demand on the airwaves when you use it. Well, the numbers are about 24 times as much. Tablets, it’s actually about 140 times as much. Netbooks, if you plug in a wireless Internet access cards, are even more than that.

Spectrum is a scarce resource where physics places some real limits on how much data can travel over the airwaves, and to go to this level of increase, 24 times, 100 times, on the same amount of spectrum, it’s actually not doable.

Now we’re going to get increases in efficiencies of technology and software, but the gap is so large that we need to free up more spectrum, more capacity to carry all of these signals.

The problem is, it would be nice if you showed up at the FCC and congratulations, you’re chairman, here’s your secret warehouse of spectrum, and go and auction it off for broadband or put it out there as unlicensed spectrum. But that warehouse doesn’t exist, and, in fact, there are no easy pickings on the spectrum chart. What we need to do as a country is reallocate spectrum from existing uses to this new use that’s sucking up so much demand, very happily, mobile broadband.

ADAM LASHINSKY: And excuse me, to use your metaphor, your warehouse metaphor, actually the spectrum is sitting there in warehouses, and the warehouses aren’t being used, right, in some cases?

ADAM LASHINSKY: Before you go on, let me try to unpack my own metaphor there, which is: There are entities, including in, prominently, television broadcasters, who own spectrum or have leased spectrum. Would that be a better way of putting it?

ADAM LASHINSKY: They have licensed spectrum, they are not using it. The rational thing would be to figure out a way to get them to sell it or give it to someone who does want to use it, right?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: Basically, yes. You know, we have an answer in this country to how we make sure that assets flow to their highest and best use: it’s called the free market. And by the way, since the early ’90s, free market principles, chiefly through the auction mechanism, have been introduced to the mobile space. So, until the mid-1990s, spectrum was allocated either by comparative hearings or lottery, and starting in the ’90s, spectrum was auctioned to the highest bidder, and there’s a direct relationship between that decision to implement auctions in the United States and the incredible innovation that we’re seeing now, by unleashing market forces on this area of the economy, on these assets.

Well, with respect to older allocations of spectrum, they’re still governed by the original FCC allocations, and the core proposal that we’ve made is to bring the auction methodology not only to the demand side, I’d call it, where you auction off spectrum to companies that want to use it, but to the supply side.

And so what we’ve proposed to do is run something called an incentive auction, where the supply of spectrum in the auction would come from existing license holders, who would contribute their spectrum to the auction in exchange for a share of the proceeds from the auction, so that it becomes an incentive-based, market-based methodology.

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: Voluntarily. So, that’s what we propose to do. We have the authority at the FCC to simply reallocate spectrum. We have the authority to take it back and auction it. We don’t have the authority to steer some of the auction proceeds to the current license holders, to make it a market-based, incentive-based process.

This is actually the best way to answer the question of how to make sure the spectrum is being used for its highest and best use. We can do this finally in a way that, as the FCC has done in a number of areas, realigns, reorganizes the spectrum in a way to free up contiguous blocks of spectrum that are most conducive to mobile broadband.

So, you mentioned broadcasting. Broadcasting has been allocated in a checkerboard manner, separated 6 megahertz channels — I know I’m lapsing into geek talk so I apologize for that, but —

ADAM LASHINSKY: It’s important to somebody, undoubtedly.

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: But fundamentally, what we need to do is bring market forces to spectrum allocation. We need this tool.

Just last week, 112 economists from across the spectrum, so to speak, Nobel Prize winners, economists who served in both republican and democratic administrations, endorsed this idea and said we need to do it. Technology companies, consumer electronics companies, the wireless industry has all said we need to do it. There’s been bipartisan legislation introduced in both houses. The President has endorsed this.

So, we’re hopeful that this is something that can happen soon. It takes time to reallocate spectrum, even through a mechanism like this, and every day that we wait imposes real costs, and we’re going to experience those costs if we don’t tackle this, through more congestions, dropped Internet connections, and just real frustrations for consumers and businesses who rely on mobile broadband and who need robust mobile broadband to do what they’re doing, and to drive our economy.

ADAM LASHINSKY: And listening to you explain this, again, it sounds reasonable, and it also sounds hopeful, like this could happen. Would the Chinese do this better than we do, and have they done this better than we do?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: It’s a great question. This is the innovator’s dilemma issue, because countries like China don’t have a history of 20th century allocations to deal with.

ADAM LASHINSKY: But they also don’t have the democratic rulemaking process and congressional process, which is quite tedious, right?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: True enough, but you know what, I prefer our system every day of the week.

But we should recognize, as we wrestle with an issue like this, that our global competitors like China, even putting aside the issue that you mentioned, can just — they don’t have to free up existing uses to meet mobile broadband needs. That’s the race that we’re in. That’s why we can’t wait.

One of the things that, as an example of what we should worry about in this area, is this. This is all about making sure that we take advantage of all the unique advantages that we have in the U.S. — that’s produced a Silicon Valley, that produces the most entrepreneurial system in the world — and make sure that in the 21st century, like in the 20th century, we’re the world leader in innovation.

Well, here’s something that should make us nervous: A company from this part of the world, a company called Applied Materials, based here, very important technology company, last year moved its CTO and its technology operations from right here in Silicon Valley, to Beijing. They’re focused in the energy technology space, and they made the decision that that’s where the action was in energy technology.

To me, that’s a canary in the coal mine, and we have to ask ourselves how many technology companies have to make the decision to move their center of gravity and technology someplace else before we declare a crisis.

We’re leading the world in mobile broadband. We’re by far the most innovative country in the world. If we take care of our infrastructure, we’ll be fine. If we don’t, other countries will have stronger platforms for innovation, more robust markets than we do, and we’ll regret it, and it’s why we’re pushing this as hard as we are.

ADAM LASHINSKY: And just for clarity’s sake, this sounds like motherhood, apple pie and Chevrolet, which leads me to ask, who would possibly be against this?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: Well, you know, I ask that question a lot, and this is — it’s the kind of thing that I think should have bipartisan support and happen quickly. I spent a couple of days in Las Vegas earlier this week at the National Association of Broadcasters, and I said to that group the same thing that I’m saying here: let’s bring market forces to this area. We’ll end up with both a stronger broadcasting industry, and spectrum freed up for mobile broadband. I would say that the broadcasting industry continues to study the issue, and — but it’s important for —

ADAM LASHINSKY: Continues to study is a Washington euphemism for they’re obstructing progress.

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: You know, listen, I think that this is a win-win for broadband and for broadcasters. We’re going to keep working every day. We’re having productive, practical conversations with broadcasters. I’m an optimist, and I think this is the right answer for the country and the right answer for the broadcasting industry, and we’re going to keep working on it.

ADAM LASHINSKY: Good. One last thing before we leave this issue of spectrum allocation. Is there an industrialized country that’s done it well already?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: You know, we led the world in the U.S. when it came to adopting auctions. Other countries all followed. We led the world when it came to transitioning over the broadcasting from analog to digital. The rest of the world is following. This is the next step. If we get this right, we will lead the world in adopting two-sided auctions, these incentive auctions, and the rest of the world will follow. If we don’t get it right, other countries will go first and they will pass us in terms of their mobile infrastructure. That’s what we’re trying to prevent.

And by the way, in the early 1990s, there were debates very similar to this about whether Congress should give the FCC auctions authority, and it took a while, but it eventually happened.

One of the points that I think is important to consider, looking at the world today, the costs of delay are much greater now than they were 20 years ago when auctions were first debated, because of the changes in the global competitive landscape. So, back then, we didn’t have as much to worry about with respect to our global competitors in the communications space. I can tell you from my interchanges with my counterparts in other countries around the world, they are looking at communications, they are looking at mobile, they understand that this is a key to economic growth and innovation. And if we’re adopting policy on the assumption that we’re the only country that’s unlocked this little secret, we’re wrong. The rest of the world knows, and they’re moving very aggressively.

ADAM LASHINSKY: Now, at the outset, I encouraged the audience to ask challenging questions, and I was going to ask you my own net neutrality question, but the following just popped up at the top of my list, which is serious: how much political pressure did Verizon VZ and Google throw at you — and let’s just assume that by you they mean the FCC — on net neutrality castration? Now, can you explain the hostility behind this question?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: You know, I won’t try to do that, but I do — let me start where you started, which is that every day, the FCC is under pressure from all sides who would like to see the FCC do one thing or the other, and one of the things that I learned quickly in the job is that if you try to tackle policy issues by optimizing for what makes a particular group happy, you’ll fail. Because one is, by definition, you can’t make everyone happy. There are many sides to these issues and what we have to do, and this is our responsibility, is focus on getting the right answers to support the goals that we’ve articulated.

ADAM LASHINSKY: And this is where you’re being a pragmatist again, right? So, some of your supporters are appalled that the FCC allowed the Comcast acquisition of NBCUniversal to go along. Others are appalled that any sort of — that you did any sort of net neutrality rulemaking. Can you talk a little bit — can you summarize where net neutrality stands?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: Sure. You know, when I was confirmed, we inherited a real mess around net neutrality. The agency had been enforcing net neutrality principles, but without ever adopting them as formal rules, and without any clarity on what the rules actually were. And it was a mess. Companies in any part of the broadband economy didn’t have certainty. The rules in fact were a mess and were subsequently struck down by a court.

I wanted to make sure that we had a framework to preserve the freedom and openness of the Internet that has led to the incredible innovation that we’ve seen, that’s empowered both businesses and speakers in the way that we all know for the last period of time, and that also encouraged the massive amount of investment we need in the infrastructure to have high speed broadband.

And we ran quite a long process, 14 months, from notice of proposed rulemaking to decision. In December we adopted a framework, open Internet rules on the books. You can read them — a little more than a page — that lay out basic protections for Internet freedom and openness, and that bring certainty and predictability to an area that was a mess.

So, the core issues are, from an FCC perspective, behind us. We’ve moved forward onto other issues. Basic protections for Internet freedom and openness are now in place.

ADAM LASHINSKY: That means they’re law. These are rules that have been written and are in effect.

ADAM LASHINSKY: And so, if I could, I want to paraphrase what that means, and tell me if it’s a fair paraphrase. So, the balance you struck is that all companies, Internet users, have a right to access to the Internet, but the companies that own the backbone, that own the networks, have an ability to make money off it. Is that a fair–

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: You know, it’s actually — it’s not unfair. We protected the core right that we’re all used to, and that needs to be enforced, to send and receive information on the Internet, to put up, whether it’s a content that you want, messages that you want to get out, or businesses that you want to start, and reach the audience. We protected those basic fundamental rights, and we did it in a way that didn’t remove the incentives for the infrastructure companies to invest in our broadband networks. We need both.

What do we need in this country? We need massive investment, private investment at the edge of the network, the kind of thing that we see here in Silicon Valley. It was very important to us to make sure that our rules incentivized not just the same levels of investment but even more. It’s an enormous competitive advantage for the United States–

ADAM LASHINSKY: Excuse me, the edge of the network? An example of that would be a company that puts up a website, right, everything from a Google to microphones.com.

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: And thanks for keeping me out of the jargon, but absolutely right, the companies that are building applications, content, services on the platform —

ADAM LASHINSKY: That are using the Internet.

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: Exactly, we need massive investment in those companies. We also need massive private investment in the infrastructure, wired and wireless, because guess what, the government’s not going to pay for 100 megabits to everyone’s home. That’s going to come from private investment on the part of infrastructure companies.

The wonderful thing is that these investments help each other, so the more investment in content services applications of the sort that you mentioned, the more consumer demand there is for bandwidth, the more return the infrastructure companies can get to make the infrastructure faster and more robust. The faster and more robust the infrastructure is, the more that a new generation of entrepreneurs say, hey wait a minute, let me see what I can do with 5 megabits, with 25 megabits, with 100 megabits.

So, in success, and I believe we did succeed, what we’ll see is a virtuous cycle of massive private investment throughout the broadband economy. What we wanted to avoid was a world in which the Internet, we lost the openness and freedom of the Internet and the kind of investment that we see here in Silicon Valley would be dried up, because you wouldn’t be sure — it’s one thing to say, let’s put something on the Internet, a new business, and see how the market does with it. That’s fine, used to that in Silicon Valley. But to have artificial restrictions on the success of companies like that would have dried up investment here.

We didn’t do that, and in fact, we’re seeing just ongoing increases in private investment. We’re also seeing more investment on the infrastructure side, too. Measured that way, which is what we were looking to accomplish, the framework we adopted I think was a great success.

ADAM LASHINSKY: Now this is, on the subject of infrastructure, a perfect segue to talk about AT&T’s T plan, $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile. Maybe let’s start on a non-controversial aspect of that. Could you explain very briefly, there’s two federal agencies that have a say in this, correct, the FCC and the Justice Department. What’s the difference in how the two agencies will look at that proposed deal?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: So, you’ve asked probably the only question I can’t answer —

ADAM LASHINSKY: I wanted to try to achieve that.

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: Because I can’t — it’s a pending transaction and I can’t talk about specific reviews, but the Justice Department is charged with enforcing the antitrust laws. We have the responsibility of determining that transactions that trigger FCC review are in the public interest. That’s the language of the statute.

ADAM LASHINSKY: And so the way that’s been paraphrased to me, or interpreted to me, is that the FCC can look at behavioral issues, how the technology is used, how consumers use the technology, or use the product, whereas the Justice Department looks at structural issues, is that right?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: Well, here’s where — I hope you have other questions, because this is an area where it’s a pending review, and we’re going to do our work, but beyond that, I can’t talk about it.

ADAM LASHINSKY: I do want to give you a flavor of the public’s mood on this by asking the following: How can we make sure we don’t get suckered by the AT&T intent to acquire T-Mobile, by AT&T offering a spurious carrot of helping with broadband deployment that AT&T already is doing, to compete with Comcast and the Dish Satellite TV network? Now, I know you’re not going to answer that. Maybe we can have — am I correct, you’re not going to answer that?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: I’m not going to answer that.

ADAM LASHINSKY: Can we figure out a way to have a conversation? One of the publicly stated tenets, AT&T’s publicly state tenets, is that this is a way, by acquiring T-Mobile, AT&T can solve some of its own spectrum reallocation desires. So, help me out here. Is there a non-rulemaking or congressional way to achieve spectrum reallocation, such as private market asset transfers?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: So, two points. One is the FCC transaction review process is an open process. We seek public comment, we seek input. Of course we’ll do that here, and so there’s going to be ample opportunity as part of the process that we’ll run for the public, for any interested party to have input into our process. And we’ve been working hard at the FCC actually to open up our processes so that you don’t have to hire a lawyer in Washington in order to express your view to us. We have channels for people to comment online. We’ve changed our rules so that online comments become an official part of the record, and I’d encourage anyone and everyone to participate in our proceedings.

The second point that I’d make is that the spectrum crunch relates to the overall demand for spectrum capacity that we have from all consumers and businesses in the United States against the overall supply of spectrum. That gap exists and can only be closed by freeing up more spectrum to meet the demands on an aggregate basis. So, nothing that happens in the marketplace changes the fundamental math of the spectrum gap, and the fundamental solution, which is that to address the challenges of aggregate demand in the United States, we need to add to the aggregate supply of spectrum.

ADAM LASHINSKY: And of course there’s — spectrum swapping happens all the time, right? It’s allowed for licensees to swap spectrum with each other?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: Subject to FCC review.

ADAM LASHINSKY: I’ll proceed with a question from the audience: Does the FCC work closely with the military to assign and encrypt bandwidth specific for military communications and transmissions?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: No. There’s a significant amount of spectrum that’s allocated to the military. It’s managed by an agency inside the Commerce Department called the NTIA. So, the answer to that question is no.

ADAM LASHINSKY: It’s a shame that people left the room for the following question: Because my husband has a brain tumor attributed to cell phone use, I testified with the FCC to Congress two years ago. The FCC said they don’t have scientific expertise to set the non-ionizing exposure limit. What can we do to finally get these exposure limits revised?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: Well, there are FCC standards on emissions. They’re set based on work that health agencies like the FDA and the WHO do, and they’re constantly doing their work. We look to them, and these are open processes and that’s how the system works.

ADAM LASHINSKY: A similar question — I’m not sure I’ll get every word, but if I don’t get every word, we’ll just paraphrase. People are wearing and using their cell phones while radioactivity in a pocket, which is against FCC compliance guidelines — is it —

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: I think it’s the same question. Again, the health agencies have looked at this, they continue to look at it. The emissions standards are based on the health research that has been done. I’m confident that our standards are protecting the health of people, and we continue to look to the FDA and World Health Organization on these kinds of issues.

ADAM LASHINSKY: How do you use your cell phone, Julius?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: I use it like a lot of other people, I use it a lot.

ADAM LASHINSKY: But I mean, do you hold it up to your head for long periods of time?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: Not when I’m driving.

ADAM LASHINSKY: There’s no federal law on that, right?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: No, it’s state laws, but this is a very serious safety issue. The number of injuries and fatalities from distracted driving is incredibly high, and my hat’s off to Ray LaHood, who’s the Secretary of Transportation, on this. We’ve worked with him to help make this a national issue, to inform people about the dangers of distracted driving. This is as important as the drunk driving campaigns have been. I have a 19 year-old young driver, and it’s a very serious issue. It’s also something that we’re making progress on as a country, but we need to make more.

ADAM LASHINSKY: Good. Are you concerned that an AT&T-T-Mobile merger will delay or impact in any way FCC progress on USF reform?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: No. USF reform is what we were talking about before, Universal Service Fund. No, I don’t think it will slow it down.

ADAM LASHINSKY: Regarding net neutrality, why did you abandon your proposal for a “third way?” Explain please what that is.

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: There was a debate about where in the Communications Act we should rest open Internet rules, and there were some strong voices in the debate. We ran an open process, thought hard about the proper legal basis, and we ended up with an approach that I’m confident will be upheld in court.

ADAM LASHINSKY: It really is a shame that I guess people didn’t trust me to read their questions. Increasing numbers of people are experiencing health problems after smart meters are installed in their homes. When people complain about the problems, they are told that the meters meet the FCC limits. What are you doing to take these people’s experience into consideration? This is slightly different from what we were discussing before.

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: Fundamentally, these are the same questions, which is concerns about emissions standards and their effect on people, and the answer is the same. We have standards, they’re based on the health work, the research that’s been done by the health agencies, and that’s how these standards are set.

ADAM LASHINSKY: I’d like to know if you can do anything about the dropped phone calls on Sand Hill Road in this area. (Laughter.)

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: You know, I had exactly that experience today. We were in the car and there are a couple of terrific people from the FCC staff who were here, and actually I had that experience of having a dropped call on Sand Hill Road.

It actually gets to a larger issue that is something that we’ve been engaged in at the FCC, which is lowering — reducing barriers, speeding up the deployment of infrastructure for broadband wired and wireless communications.

Around the country, the ability of infrastructure companies to install the basic stuff that you need in order to get signals — antennas, et cetera — in some places it’s a lot harder than others, and we need to find a way as a country to both respect the interests and needs of local communities, but also make sure they take into account the desires of people to have communications equipment that works.

Now, I understand that there’s real progress being made here on Sand Hill Road. That’s what I was told. In the first instance, these are issues for local governments and municipalities. We do look at it from a national perspective and ask whether there are larger obstacles we can eliminate, ways that we can make sure that infrastructure is deployed everywhere in a way that gets people the service that they want. And there’s a lot of innovation going on now in the way the towers or antennas look, and I think, whether it’s antennas on flagpoles or antennas hidden among tress, there are a lot of answers to this. But there’s no way to deliver signals without the infrastructure that delivers signals.

ADAM LASHINSKY: You know, you travel around the country and confront these issues all the time. Is there another place in the United States where dropped calls could possibly be more ironic than there?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: Ironic is the word that comes to mind.

ADAM LASHINSKY: Okay, two political questions, and this first one may seem a little flip, but I think it’s a legitimate question. The questioner asks: Why have you made so many trips to the White House, and how, if at all, do those trips reflect on the FCC’s independence?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: You know, the FCC is the country’s expert agency for communications. We deal with public safety, we deal with issues that are central to our economy of the sort we’re talking about, like broadband. We consult with Congress, with the executive branch. It’s important for the FCC to be a resource to both Congress and the executive branch as policies are made, that affect one-sixth of the economy and the public safety of every American.

ADAM LASHINSKY: You’re saying there’s nothing unusual with the FCC Chairman visiting the White House, not only not unusual, but appropriate.

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: It’s appropriate, and it’s recognized in the Communications Act.

ADAM LASHINSKY: Google GOOG recently showed a face recognition technology. Do you have any concern that this could violate privacy?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: You know, I don’t have a view on that. I think that it’s really important to encourage the incredible innovation that we’re seeing in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. It’s obviously also important to make sure that people’s basic fundamental privacy rights are protected. We’re in a period, as technology evolves so quickly, of sorting out what that means, and finding the right balance that encourages innovation and all the benefits to consumers from that, while making sure that people’s rights to control their information are honored in the new economy.

ADAM LASHINSKY: I promised you two political questions, and I left out the second one, which is, how will the federal budget and deficit crunches affect broadband deployment and adoption? And I might throw in there as well I’m curious to know how it will affect the FCC.

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: The second question first. We have been, from the day I got there, and continue to be, very fiscally conscious when it comes to our budget and spending money. Now the FCC’s work has generated over $50 billion for the treasury through spectrum auctions, and I think there’s bipartisan support for the idea that we should continue to do our work, to generate not only that direct positive contribution to the budget, but also the very broad economic benefits that come from a healthy communications infrastructure, wireless communications. The benefits are tenfold or more.

And it’s one of the reasons, by the way, that I’m a very strong supporter of auctions as a methodology to allocate spectrum, and I’m also a very strong supporter of the other major policy innovation in the last 20 years around spectrum, which is unlicensed spectrum.

And this is worth pausing on for a minute, because it’s a great Silicon Valley success story. People may not realize that the Wi-Fi we use in our homes and businesses, it’s also based on spectrum like our smartphones and tablets, but it’s based not on licensed spectrum but on unlicensed spectrum, and it’s actually worth — you may not know this story, Adam, and so I’m going to — it’s worth telling the story, because it’s very interesting.

Before auctions, as I’ve mentioned before, the FCC allocated spectrum on the basis of being very concrete and saying, here’s some spectrum that should be used for this exact purpose. And there was a band of spectrum that no one could figure out what to do with. It was surrounded by a lot of other uses. You couldn’t use it at high power without interference, and it became known as the junk band. Sat there for awhile, and then one day, someone at the FCC said, you know, we don’t know what to do with this. Why don’t we just put this spectrum on the market. Without a specific allocation, and without handing it over to a specific company, let’s see what innovators can do with this unlicensed spectrum. We’ll put power limits on so that there can’t be interference, we’ll make it clear that it’s secondary, so if there is interference, they lose out. Let’s see what happens.

And interesting things happened. First, garage openers, based on unlicensed spectrum, then baby monitors, cordless phones. But then a group of innovators here in Silicon Valley said, you know, we might be able to use this unlicensed spectrum to connect to network computers in a small area. So, they developed the Wi-Fi standard, and on this unlicensed platform, developed something that’s not only a $1 trillion industry at this point, but that has provided just enormous benefits to all of us.

To me healthy spectrum strategy for our country incorporates both auctioned spectrum by license, and unlicensed spectrum, and in fact, a few months ago, we did the first release of unlicensed spectrum in 25 years at the FCC called White Spaces Spectrum, that will allow — think of it as super Wi-Fi, the next generation of Wi-Fi, with much better propagation characteristics. We’re very supportive of this, and very interested in what the next generation of innovators will come up with on this new platform, for mobile innovation.

ADAM LASHINSKY: I just had a great idea. Given our budget situation, why in the world would you release unlicensed spectrum? You had an opportunity to license it and make more money for the U.S. Treasury.

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: Because we need to do both. And so the incentive auction proposal that I mentioned will generate literally billions of dollars for the treasury. It’s one of the many reasons we should move forward with it, but we also should recognize the economic benefits and the tax revenue that comes from the innovation, the unexpected innovation, on unlicensed platforms. That will, one, make a real contribution to our deficit over time, and two, it’s another area where it’s vital that those innovations happen here in the U.S., and then get exported to the rest of the world, as opposed to having those innovations happen someplace else and the associated job creation, economic benefits, and have us be a customer of someone else’s products.

ADAM LASHINSKY: This one is — I think I know the answer, but it’s of interest to me: Does the FCC have any jurisdiction when it comes to monopolization of media partisanship, and can the FCC help promote more balanced, fact-based media? I have no idea what this person’s talking about.

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: You know, I’m a very strong supporter of the First Amendment and basic free speech principles, and I think it’s a really good thing that we don’t have a tradition in this country of interfering with political content, and it’s something that I am passionate about. Perhaps my brief history as a journalist that you alluded to has something to do with it. But we’re going to honor the First Amendment very strongly at the FCC.

ADAM LASHINSKY: But what role does the FCC have in that discussion of — really, this person’s asking about media concentration.

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: So, there are transactions that have to come to the FCC for review. The Comcast-NBC transaction was one of them. It also went to the Justice Department. And we’ll do our work in connection with transactions like that, as we will other transactions.

ADAM LASHINSKY: I have a question from a dreamer who doesn’t want to listen to your description of the innovator’s dilemma in this country, and it is: if we were to look at demand for broadband, and we were to reengineer this supply, or reengineer the infrastructure, what and how would we build that infrastructure, if we could start from scratch?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: Well, if we could start from scratch, we’d have a very significant amount of spectrum licensed for flexible use by auction, and we’d have a significant amount of spectrum made available for unlicensed use, and we would let, in both cases, the market and innovators sort out the best and most productive uses of spectrum.

ADAM LASHINSKY: I have one last question, which is, can you share with us here an anecdote of an example of something that law student Barack Obama did as the editor at the Harvard Law Review?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: He was a tough editor, I’ll tell you that, and a very talented one. And I apologize, I don’t have any specific anecdotes other than that. He was the person in our class most likely to become President.

ADAM LASHINSKY: Literally. So, that vote was taken?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: Well, I think his election to become President of the Harvard Law Review I think was the first election that he won.

ADAM LASHINSKY: I’ll ask you a slightly different way. Writers and their editors are famous for fighting with each other like crazy. Did you two ever have a knock-down, drag-out fight over something in the review?

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: Well, we were both editors, so —

ADAM LASHINSKY: I see, you were on the same side.

JULIUS GENACHOWSKI: We were on the same side.

ADAM LASHINSKY: All right. Well, I hope you all enjoyed this evening’s program, brought to you by the Commonwealth Club Silicon Valley. Again, we would like to thank Julius Genachowski, Chairman of the FCC, our audience here in Mountain View, and those of you joining us on the radio. I am Adam Lashinsky, Senior Editor at Large for Fortune Magazine, and now this meeting of the Commonwealth Club, celebrating over 100 years of enlightened discussion, is adjourned. Thank you.

Summary: On April 14, 2011 Fortune's Adam Lashinsky interviewed Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, in Mountain View, Calif., at an event sponsored by the Commonwealth Club of California. The chairman danced around the most prominent item on his agenda, the proposed acquisition of T-Mobile by AT&T. He also discussed spectrum re-allocation, his pragmatic…