When the FCC gets into the details of implementing , there will be disagreements on how to move forward, said Blair Levin, who served as executive director of the FCC's Omnibus Broadband Initiative. But it will be important for the agency to move forward, he said.

"We really wanted the plan to be a call for action, and we think that's the kind of reaction that we're now getting," he said during a Brookings Institution forum on the broadband plan. "People are finally understanding the need for a plan and the need for action."

Some commentators have already suggested the 360-page plan, released Tuesday, is , Levin said. But while many people in the tech and telecom communities have expressed general support for the plan, some have already found things to criticize.

"If you actually read the commentary, everybody supports large pieces of it," Levin said. "We were joking that our aspiration was for everyone in the [Internet] ecosystem to love 80 percent, marginalize 10 percent of it, and really hate 10 percent. That would be a good, balanced approach."

The FCC's broadband team wanted to create a comprehensive and balanced document, Levin said. The document needed to be data-driven and befitting an expert agency, he added. "We wanted it to be the kind of advice that companies would get if they had billions of dollars on the line," he said. "What we wanted to do is provide the data necessary to make intelligent value judgments."