Chopra Urges Public-Private Partnership on Technology
U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra called for a “commonwealth” approach in which government and businesses come together on friendly terms to advance the “common good.” Under this approach, laws aren’t always needed to effect positive change, he said in a keynote at Supercomm. In another keynote, Cox President Patrick Esser advocated a public-private approach to spur broadband adoption. Meanwhile, an AT&T executive warned that regulatory uncertainty could undermine investment by the telecom industry.
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After his speech, Chopra spent 90 minutes with exhibitors on the show floor, 50 minutes longer than planned, Supercomm Managing Director Jan Maciejewski said in an interview. Chopra asked companies about how best to improve broadband speeds, what the next “disruptive” technologies are and how as the federal CTO he can be of help, Maciejewski said. He said Chopra seemed “particularly interested” in smaller suppliers, and asked for follow-up discussions with many exhibitors. “He wasn’t just doing it because I'd asked him nicely” to walk around, and he didn’t treat each booth visit as a two-minute formality, the Supercomm manager said. “I actually had to draw him away from some stands.”
Technology is already having a “dramatic effect” on business, but the U.S. is still far behind other countries in many categories, including e-government and technology use in higher education, Chopra said. The U.S. should invest in smart, secure infrastructure that provides tools to protect cybersecurity while preserving Internet openness, he said. The country should also promote competition to spur entrepreneurship and make encouraging technology breakthroughs a national priority, Chopra said. Added research and development spending and technological training for workers are crucial to that approach, he said.
The digital era is still in its “infancy,” Chopra said. Consumers are already making significant use of Internet infrastructure, and the demand will only accelerate, he said. In 2008, people used just under 1 Gb a month, he said, and by 2013 the figure will be 4.7 Gb, five times as much.
Chopra said he’s working toward President Barack Obama’s goal of a more open, participatory government. Government is “moving forward” on disclosing spending information and other data, he said. The CTO encouraged listeners to submit ideas about the kind of data the government can release as part of that process. Americans should “have the information your way,” said Chopra, calling for a “multimodal” approach providing multiple communications avenues for information access.
Businesses and government should work together toward a shared vision and “detailed roadmap” for spurring broadband adoption, said Cox’s Esser. The effort requires creative thinking and “good old American innovation,” he said. A key to encouraging adoption is making Internet use “simple, reliable and easy,” he said.
Getting high-speed access for children should be an emphasis of the broadband-adoption effort, Esser said. It should make adoption by low-income families and classrooms a priority, he said. He cited a Pew study that found only 35 percent of low-income families have broadband: “It’s this stark digital divide that I think is rather disturbing.”
“Regulation should understand there’s plenty of competition in the market,” cautioned AT&T Operations President John Stankey. And investments remain high even in a bad economy, he said. Consumers aren’t complaining to AT&T that they're not getting innovation in broadband or wireless, he said. In wireless, most consumers in the U.S. can choose from four national carriers, 630 devices and many applications and operating systems, he said: “It’s not an area where we need more regulation and more intervention.”
Network operators need regulatory certainty to maintain high investment levels, Stankey said. Regulators lately seem more inclined to protect the application layer than provide a “good investment environment” for “long-lived” infrastructure assets, Stankey said. Applications have a “much shorter shelf life” than infrastructure, he said. “I'm not sure that that issue is well understood at the moment.”
Permitting burdens represent one of the biggest barriers to reaching people with broadband, Stankey said. He said he gets more complaints from customers in urban areas like San Francisco that aren’t getting broadband because of right-of- way rules than people in rural areas who are upset about broadband choice, he said. “I sometimes wonder if we have our priorities” straight, he said.