On July 23, 2018, Blair Levin, Executive Director of Gig.U, and Nonresident Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institute’s Metropolitan Policy Project, provided opening remarks at the Next Century Cities Making Connections Regional Broadband Summit in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In a powerful speech, he identified “learning” as the secret to smart policies about smart cities, and then widened the lens to show us what he has learned. Using various examples, he described how the FCC’s latest approach will not get us closer to a solution on how to facilitate the deployment of next generation networks because the FCC intends to restrict the very entities, local governments, that are best equipped to solve this challenge. In Mr. Levin’s analysis, it is local governments that are best positioned to move this country forward, because they represent and understand the environment where those deployments will take place.