Governments should ‘enable that which will come’ in setting broad...
Governments should “enable that which will come” in setting broadband policy, David Gross, U.S. coordinator for international communications and information policy, said Monday in a keynote at a Technology Policy Institute forum. Policy should enable “technologists to develop technology,…
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entrepreneurs to create opportunities, and people to be able to take the services and buy the equipment that they're interested in having,” Gross said, acknowledging that that’s easier said than done. “Incumbency is often a huge impediment” to change, he said, citing “remarkable progress” in extending the Internet the past 10 years. Next week’s OECD ministerial conference in Seoul, South Korea, on the Internet economy’s future highlights the change, he said. The first such meeting in Asia, it will assemble 1,500 to 2,000 people, a “very impressive cross-section” of the world, he said. The last OECD Internet-economy ministerial, in 1998, focused on what government can do to enable people to get online. “It’s happened,” he said. “That set of issues” from 1998 “has broadened in ways that no one could reasonably have anticipated… to envelop the entire world.” Internet matters are figure in Africa, South Asia and the Middle East -- areas that in 1998 had almost no telecom technology, Gross said. “This quantum leap is something people only now are beginning to understand and recognize its importance.” There’s a lesson in that, he said. “Those who seek to predict the future are almost always, invariably wrong.”