Episode 8.2: Professor Sanford Williams: Friends, Family, and the FCC

Courtland Cuevas:
Hi everyone, I'm Courtland Cuevas. Welcome to another episode of Dialectic from UCLA Law Review. We are lucky to be joined today by Professor Sanford Williams. Professor Williams is a lecturer at UCLA School of Law and teaches Lawyering in Administrative Agencies - Current Issues at the Federal Communications Commission. He's worked at the FCC since 1999 and is currently both a Special Advisor to the FCC Chairwoman and Deputy Managing Director of the FCC. Professor Williams received his BS in Operations Research in Industrial Engineering and an MBA from Cornell University. He received his JD from the University of Virginia School of Law where he was a member of the Virginia Law Review. Professor Williams is especially interested in digital equity, telehealth, gender and racial healthcare disparities and mental health issues. Thank you for being on the podcast, Professor Williams.

Sanford Williams:
Thank you for having me.

Courtland Cuevas:
Professor Williams, you are incredibly accomplished. To get us started, can you tell us a little more about you and your background? I see you studied engineering. Just tell us a little bit more about yourself.

Sanford Williams:
Oh, thanks. I was born and raised in New Jersey, right outside New York City and when I went to college, my parents who didn't come from means wanted me to do well obviously and take care of my family and pursue the career they thought was the best for me — to make money, to be honest with you. So I did pretty well in school and they said, "Hey, well engineering's pretty hot. I think you should try engineering." So I was good at math and science. I said, sure, I'll try that. So I went off to Cornell University — when I was 15 years old, I should add, I guess — enrolled in the College of Engineering. Really enjoyed it and when I finished I was so young, I was like, well, I'm not ready to work full-time yet, so let me see what else I can do. So I went and got my MBA, which was a fabulous experience.
I loved my MBA program at Cornell. The only thing that was kind of deleterious for me in the long run, which I didn't realize at the time, was that I had no work experience. So many of the things that we talked about during my MBA program I did not get or understand or have full knowledge of because I never worked in the "real world," so to speak. But I learned a lot. So I enjoyed those two programs. When I finished with those, I got married, my wife and I moved to New York City, worked there for a couple of years and decided to go to law school and looked at law schools, decided to go to the University of Virginia, which ended up being the school my wife went to medical school as well. We lived our time there. I went from there and I will add, since we've talked about this "off camera," so to speak, that my wife and I and all three of our children with three children graduated from University of Virginia and Big UVA sports fans and we got beat by Courtland's Wisconsin Badgers pretty badly in basketball yesterday. So I'm still reeling from that, but that's how I got where I got.

Courtland Cuevas:
That's really amazing. So what led you to law school? What was the reasoning behind the move to pursue a legal education?

Sanford Williams:
Good question. So with that, I did pretty well when I was younger and everything, so I didn't really have a bent to doing anything. Like I said, my parents kind of pushed me towards engineering a little bit. But one thing that I did have a passion for was helping people. Justice. My father was the first Black history teacher I believe ever in the history of Newark, New Jersey. Started teaching Black history back at a time in the early, late sixties, early seventies I believe when there was no Black history courses, meaning that all the courses were just history or world history. And doing that living in north New Jersey around New York City and meeting lots of folks in the area then, he really had a passion for justice and for helping people, and I picked up that passion. So after I finished business school and was working in New York City, I thought, what do I really want to do? And one of the things I loved was pursuing justice and one of the best ways to do that is to be a lawyer. So that was probably the catalyst for me going to law school.

Courtland Cuevas:
So after you finished law school, you joined the FCC in 1999. Can you provide an overview of the Federal Communications Commission and its role in regulating communications within the United States?

Sanford Williams:
Yeah, I'd love to. So went to FCC in 1999 because I had three children at that time then and the three children we have now still. And my wife and I wanted to be very involved in our kids' lives and I wanted to strike a balance between my work life. I wanted to be challenging on engaging and dynamic, but I also wanted to have a life. So the FCC was a perfect, I guess, compromise or perfect kind of place to work where I had great work and also was able to coach my kids' basketball teams and go to their soccer games and things of that nature. The FCC specifically, a lot of folks my children's age, they know the FCC from Eminem song. He raps "The FCC won't let me be" because he talks about the FCC and then looking at his lyrics when he's performing on network television because, and the FCC does have lots of oversight of lots of different things that people are familiar with.
So they've oversight of a network television — ABC, NBC, CBS — when things happen there. If anything happens that folks don't like or they violate our rules, we get complaints and we oversee that. We also oversee Spectrum, the Spectrum that's auctioned to provide broadband 5G and to provide wifi. We oversee that and those auctions that oversee spectrum. We also oversee XM radio, so anything with XM radio, satellite radio, we oversee also are in charge of overseeing the internet to a greater extent that we look at things on the internet, but not in terms of content but in terms of offerings and how their Comcast and other folks provide offerings on the internet. In addition to that, we do radio. So FM/AM radio isn't as big as it used to be, but we do oversee FM/AM radio. If there any complaints about that, we look at that and are able to provide jurisdiction over the things that I've seen or profane or indecent. And so we do a lot of things. Basically anything communications, the FCC oversees.

Courtland Cuevas:
So how did you land at the FCC? What was the process to joining?

Sanford Williams:
That's a great question. I landed the FCC in great part because my wife, who's a physician, got a residency spot at Johns Hopkins and when she got a spot at Johns Hopkins, we were looking to relocate after. We were in Atlanta at the time. I was like, look, I got to find a job in the DC area, DMV as we like to call it — DC, Maryland, Virginia. So I look at the law firms, I looked at government agencies and the FCC was a place that jived best with both my career goals and my personal goals.

Courtland Cuevas:
So can you describe a little bit more about what your role is at the FCC?

Sanford Williams:
My role now, I've done a lot of different things, which is why I love the FCC as well. We have seven bureaus and 11 offices ranging from things — one thing I mentioned earlier is the International Bureau. We also work with folks in international communications issues. We have international bureau, we have a wireless bureau, wireline bureau. I've been able to move around and do those things while I was there. But currently what I do is twofold. One, I'm in the called OMD Office of Managing Director and the office of Managing Director, they oversee all the administration operations of FCC, so that's HR, computers, anything to do with IT, the budget. So I work as a deputy managing director overseeing those things. But I also work in another job, which I really love as the Special Advisor to the Chairwoman. So the chairwoman general Jessica Rosenworcel appointed me after Biden appointed her as the Chairwoman to be a Special Advisor to work on a variety of issues from digital equity to anything dealing with equality, to really anything that comes up. So I'm able to work with her closely and help her pursue her agenda of equity and overseeing communications and making it available for all.

Courtland Cuevas:
That's really cool. So what is a normal workday like at the FCC?

Sanford Williams:
As you kind of get a feel of my talk in class there is, for me, it's probably any normal. I can get a call one day saying a White House wants to meet your boss, to what I did last week, come to Capitol Hill with Chuck Schumer to do a press conference, to their problems with IT and our computer systems were down, how do we fix it, to their issues with their contracting. So there's a personnel issue, there's a dispute between the manager and subordinate or there could be something with Verizon calling about, we have want to talk to lobby you about an issue that you're working on. So they're very dynamic and it can go from computer issues to the White House, but it makes it fun. So I don't have a typical day so to speak, but my days are always filled with unexpected surprises and things that are dynamic and challenging. And overall I have to say it's fun because I work with a bunch of people at the agency who really want to do what's best for the American people and pursue that agenda.

Courtland Cuevas:
So what are the skills you rely upon most in facing the day-to-day challenges of your job?

Sanford Williams:
I think the biggest thing, time management, it might sound kind of funny or weird, but I think for time management, one thing that helped me immensely was being the father of three children and balancing their multitude, plethora of activities, academic and social and everything else. And learning how to try to balance work/life with them. So family in general, I guess. So I think work/life balance is very important to me and the skills I learned in try to obtain that. And my kids are now 34, 32 and 24, so they're all launched and grown and all great kids, thankfully, and great people. But those skills kind of helped me at work and I think those time management skills are probably number one. And then number two, I guess a close second would be just relating to people. I think that most people in most jobs when you get hired, you have the requisite educational knowledge or the ability to gain it.
So that's not the issue. The issue is how you relate to folks. And I think relating to folks is important. And I told this to somebody recently, I said, when I'm in the building, when I see the security guard who gave me a hug when I came in last week, I haven't seen her in a while. Or I see the chairwoman who gave me a hug because I hadn't seen her in a while. I treat them each with the same amount of respect and dignity, each doing their best to help pursue the mission. And I think when you treat people with respect like that, it helps establish a positive environment. It helps them be the best they can be and ends up with the best work product. We don't do it for that, but I think that that helps. So I think that time management and then treating folks with respect, those are the two biggest skills that I've learned. And there's something that's third, which is probably a close third, is just staying up to date on things that are going on. So I mean, you obviously have to be knowledgeable about the field, which is always dynamic, where things change constantly and being knowledgeable as well. So that would be the third thing I would add.

Courtland Cuevas:
So what are some of the most important issues on the FCC's docket right now?

Sanford Williams:
Well, the one that's on the top of the news front page everyone's talking about is the internet. We right now, and I won't get too much into details, but we right now are in the process and have a proposal to change how we oversee the internet. We currently look at the internet and we have some oversight over it at the FCC and we look at it under our rules as title one and information service. So we look at internet's an information service, which is what is classified currently. And as such, we kind of have what we'll call light touch. We don't really regulate it. There are emergencies with outages. We can get involved generally, but we don't really regulate it. We have proposed to change it from being an information service to more like a telecommunication service and more like telephones, which the FCC also oversees as well, telephone service, and I dunno if I mentioned that earlier, but that's a big one, telephone and wireless service. So that proposal which just came out last month would basically say that the FCC has more oversight over the internet. And what does that mean? It doesn't mean necessarily look at pricing, but we do look at where it's offered. Is it offered equitably? Things like there are outages, people need to let us know, but right now the outages were 45 days somewhere. People don't have to let us know. Providers don't have to let us know that. The consumers complain, we'll know, but they don't have to let us know. So if there's someplace where folks don't have time to complain, we wouldn't know that. Now they — mandatory that they would let us know what's going on so we can step in. When folks are provision internet service and there are emergencies going on, we have the right to tell folks you have to do it.
So what does that mean? I know there was a case, and I want to say in Arizona, but I'm not sure I have to look it up, but basically there was, I think a fire department internet service was not robust enough and they couldn't pay for it and the provider wouldn't increase their speeds and there was an emergency they couldn't get to because their internet wasn't working properly. So there was something negative that happened because of that. I'll leave it at that. So we'll be able now under this new proposal to have a certain more authority over internet companies and make sure something that happens, especially with public safety folks, we said, well, we can override them and say, look, you have to provide this and just to make the internet more available to folks, which is in conjunction with the second thing that we're working on, digital discrimination. Congress asked us two years ago to provide rules to prevent and eliminate "digital discrimination."
And that's exactly from the IJA, the Infrastructure Act. Those rules were due by November, 2023. And those two things together will help hopefully increase access to folks to have access to their internet because as we saw by the pandemic, internet is not a nice thing to have or want to, it's a must have. We're trying to do what we can to treat like utility to make sure all folks have equitable access and can use it, can afford it, and that it can help them live their everyday lives. So those are two of the bigger things. And then we have Spectrum things and wireless and wireline phones. You are always looking at what's going on with that. And AI is a huge thing. There was an executive order recently on artificial intelligence where the government and OMB, which is official government, oversee government agency pretty much, or it gives us orders, asked every government agency to come up with an AI task force and deal with that. So we're working on that as well. Tons of moving parts and lots of things that I haven't even mentioned that are going on, but those are some of the important things we're working on now.

Courtland Cuevas:
How does the FCC involve the public in its decision-making and what avenues are available to citizens to voice their concerns?

Sanford Williams:
Excellent. So we have what's called notice and comment proceedings and the class I teach next semester, not the class you're in, we talk more about that. So you're going to learn that. So we have notice and comment proceedings where as when we have rules, like the rules I mentioned about the open internet, we give notice that these are our rules and anybody can comment on the rules and submit them to us at the FCC. So that's the biggest way that public can get involved. However, we also are cognizant of the fact that everybody's not looking at our rules and everyone doesn't have time to get online to file comments. So one thing that we've done, and I specifically personally did recently was I mentioned that we've just released rules on Monday, which talked about discrimination. Before we got to those rules, we had a notice and common proceeding where we said, we want to do this certain thing with digital discrimination.
These are our proposed rules, what do you think? And we got public comments. Then we had reply comments and reply comment cycle. But knowing that wasn't enough, talking with the chairwoman, we tried to think of ways to get the public more involved. So we thought about, hey, why don't we do listening sessions where we go around the country to different places and actually hear from the folks who are affected by digital discrimination and see how they're impacted. So I said, "Hey, I'm out here in California," and I dunno if we mentioned at the beginning, even though I still work at the FCCI relocated to California two years ago. So I live in LA but work in DC remotely. So I said, "Hey, I'm out in LA, I work with the mayor's office, I work with whatever folks I can network with and we'll do something."
So she said, "Great, go for it." And I organized a listening session earlier this year in Los Angeles at the beehive in South Los Angeles. And we're able to have folks who are consumers, companies, providers, the mayor's office politicians, advocacy groups, all kinds of folks who are able to tell us firsthand, this is what's going on in LA This is the issue that we face because we in Washington don't know everything and we can't see everything. But what we do know is informed by folks who were on the ground. So we talked to folks here and had a great listening session and put back a bunch of information and we repeated that eight different times across the country. So we had listening sessions in Kansas and Washington State, Baltimore, Maryland, Chicago, and all over the country just to get more feedback. And those enhanced the feedback we got.
And also in terms of getting public input, one thing we did was we proactively reached out to tons of different community groups across the country to get their input and feedback. And we do that in lots of different proceedings when we can because again, folks aren't sitting around saying, "When's the FCC going to release some notice and comment proceedings so I can comment on these things?" Or people don't even know how to do that half the time even they are aware of it. So it's our job to make sure that we go out and get the information from folks. So we are proactively trying to do things like listening sessions and just talking to different groups to get as much information as possible and to inform folks about what's going on, what we're doing.

Courtland Cuevas:
For students interested in pursuing a career at the FCC, what advice do you have for them?

Sanford Williams:
They should contact me. They can email me, Sanford Williams of UCLA Law School if they're interested and I would love to talk about telecommunications. I'm passionate about what we do and its impact and its effects. So that's one thing. But in addition to hit me up and contacting me, they can do lots of things. There are lots of groups around LA who are heavily involved in telecom ranging from things like the mayor's office in Los Angeles County to groups like Everyone On which nationally does digital works on digital issues and gets folks connected and the divide across the country. But based in LA, they can join the FCBA, the Federal Education Communications Bar Association, which is based in DC but has a southern California chapter, has lots of members in it. So there are folks who working in law firms here and one (me) working with FCC, who are involved as well.
So that's way to connect and get connected. There are programs at the FCBA for college students and for law students. Law students can join for free. It's a great networking opportunities so they can go to attend webinars online and meet with folks that way. So there's lots of things that they can do to get involved. Now in terms of skills, I think the skills... interesting, especially from a lawyer's perspective. You just have to basically be interested in making a difference in working a dynamic environment. I have an engineering degree and that has helped me a lot and have an MBA as well, which has helped me a lot in some of the things I work on when I look at balance sheets and different things. However, for most of my attorney colleagues, most of my attorney colleagues have neither an MBA nor an engineering degree, and they do fabulously well.
It's something that you can easily pick up and learn like you do if you're a litigator, you learn different topics. So I think in order to be successful, you have to want help folks, not be afraid to work in a dynamic environment and be willing to learn about different things. But definitely lots of things to do and work on. Again, ranging from AI to discrimination to television stations, to obscenity rules to wireless, wireline, telephone stuff to the internet, lots of great things going on and technology's not going away. So the communications mode may change. So maybe 30 years ago we were more worried about network television. Now it's the internet, but we still will be involved in overseeing communications.

Courtland Cuevas:
All right. So we'll finish with some quick hitters. You can have dinner with five guests, anybody in the world, who are you bringing to your dinner table?

Sanford Williams:
Man, Courtland, that's a tough one. So I thought about that, and I have to say, and this might sound kind of hokey, but it'd be my three kids and my wife, that'd be four. And then the fifth would be a friend. I have a specific friend in mind, but if I say that friend and other friends might get upset. So I'd say my four family members and then a fifth friend who shall remain nameless.

Courtland Cuevas:
I love that. Second question, who are your top five basketball players of all time?

Sanford Williams:
You're killing me. So this is uh — you know I love basketball! I'd have to say trying to be objective because I'm a huge Laker fan. Magic. Kareem. Kobe. Alright, that's three. LeBron, obviously four. Then that fifth one's a tough one. I want to say Wilt Chamberlain, but you got Steph Curry, you got Durant, so for the fifth one, I'd have to say a bunch of folks...

Courtland Cuevas:
No Michael Jordan?

Sanford Williams:
Michael Jordan. Oh, Michael Jordan. Sorry, let's say Jordan — I'm a Laker fan, but let's say Jordan five. It was Jordan and Wilt, that's what my thing was... let's say Jordan five. Thank you, Courtland, I knew you would help. Jordan five. Yeah, so that's five. That's my top five. The three Lakers. Actually, I guess that's four Lakers, right? No, three Lak— Jabbar, Kobe...

Courtland Cuevas:
Magic, Kareem, Kobe, LeBron, and Mike.

Sanford Williams:
LeBron. It says four Lakers and Jordan. Yes, that's it. Okay.

Courtland Cuevas:
That's a great list. So last question, what is one piece of advice that you would tell to your younger self?

Sanford Williams:
I would say a combination. Two things. Trust your instincts and be authentic. My instincts have served me pretty well, which is very fortunate. I think people don't do that enough. And if you get far, you know, do well in school, whatever, I think we all have instincts that kind of lead us and to be authentic. And from my class, I don't know what a typical law school professor is, but I know that's not me. But I do know that I want to get the information across in the way that you're educated and understand things and are able to learn and glean the things that you need to learn from legal perspective, but to convey it in a way that works for me. So I'm not going to be able to stand up and go to a PowerPoint and lecture straight from the PowerPoint for an hour.
That's not me. I'm going to break it up and tell stories about my family or talk about how Wisconsin beat UVA in basketball or whatever comes to mind and throw it in there. And hopefully I don't do too much of that stuff so you get what you paid, what you're paying for, but being authentic. And I think that being authentic is so important in every aspect of your life because I think it frees you to be yourself. Also conveys to other folks the sincerity, that they understand where you're coming from and it's easier to just be who you are with the caveat that authenticity does not mean it gives you a license to be mean or rude or not respect people, but being authentic. So I think the advice would be to be authentic and trust your instincts.

Courtland Cuevas:
Well, thank you very much for being on the podcast, Professor Williams. I really appreciate you taking the time and do it and all the gems that you left us with in this interview. Thank you.

Sanford Williams:
My pleasure. It's a pleasure having you in class and getting to know you. And thank you. I feel honored that you had me and great job with it. I enjoyed it.

Courtland Cuevas:
We hope you enjoyed another episode of Dialectic with UCLA Law Review. This has been Courtland Cuevas.