 It's a pleasure to be here. What I want to do today is try to put things together a little bit from the context of the intersection of technology and economic policy, which is where I work. And a lot of the issues that you talked about here today, it's going to be impossible to cover even a snapshot of what was covered there. And I want to begin by opening up in a way that I think is a little bit challenging for those of us who are used to doing sort of a hard-nosed economic analysis. And that is, when you think about the metrics that we have to measure economic policy, particularly economic policy in an era of tremendous technological development, you look to something like measured labor productivity growth, and the conventional wisdom should be that more technology, we're more productive, it's growing faster than ever, and that's somehow tied to wealth generation. That's sort of a conventional superficial wisdom that the economists in the back are shaking their heads. I don't know, that's not exactly it. And if you look at the period 1948 to 2005, you had an average of about 2.5 percent average measured labor productivity growth, which sounds pretty good. And so you'd think that, of course, as the digital revolution continued, as it got more and more profound, that that number would increase. And yet actually since 2005, that productivity has slowed to 1.2 percent on average. And what that shows us is, first of all, I think it's a really awkward fact that we have to confront. We have to recognize that one of two things are true. There are ability to recognize what the conventional wisdom regards as productivity and development in the workforce and in the economy. Those metrics are either out of whack, and we don't have all the right ways of accounting for the sort of growth and innovation that's taking place, or there may be a tremendous number that are being left behind, some of whom include workers. And what I want to talk about today is to challenge a little bit this notion that we're coming up on a major anniversary of John Perry Barlow's Declaration of Independence of the Internet, most of you know about this, right? And one of the key lines goes something like this, you know, governments, you have no place here. And then it says a lot of really much more unpleasant things about government. And the conventional wisdom has for decades been that governments have a minimal, if not an unexistent role to play in the development of technology and the development of the technological economy. And what I'd like to take a moment to challenge today are a few areas, a few limited areas, where government intervention, if we want to say it non-pejoratively, is probably going to be essential, not just in continuing the blistering pace of innovation and economic growth that we've seen, but actually in ensuring that the benefits of that growth are going to be more widely shared. And this is something that, you know, someone who grew up in the Bay Area could not be more salient right now. And as we look at some of the challenges that we have in things like wage growth across this economy are true well beyond just the technological space. And so let me cover four briefly. First, research and development. Second, infrastructure and access. Third, skills and participation. And then finally, what I want to call the breaks in the tracks, the things that I think could derail in a big way some of the benefits and development of our information economy. So first, let me talk about investments in R&D that underlies a lot of this. One of the least sexy topics that could possibly exist, particularly because a lot of the way we're used to thinking about research and development, of course, is focused on the sheer numbers. How much government's investing? How much the private sector is investing? And just looking at that as a sort of superficial baseline metric. Obviously, we have some strong numbers to post. In 2015, American business devoted 1.8% of GDP to R&D, which is the highest share on record. That's a good percentage. And yet, at the same time, while business investment is crucial here, a huge amount of this investment is business. We also have to recognize that not all R&D is created equal. There is the R&D in the form of basic research. There's the R&D in the form of applied research. And there's R&D, of course, in the form of development. The private sector is exceptionally good at that third one, development, getting out to market. And there is an incredibly important role, one that I think is underattended to in part because when you're engaging with technology on a daily basis and you're pulling out your mobile phone, you're not seeing it, that is the government role in investing in basic research. And the absence of that public investment can have incredibly detrimental effects in the overall value chain that is created through research and development. So look at the numbers. And it is clearly a view of this administration that we need to be doing more investment in research and development. It's not enough to just say that the private sector is investing a lot in research and development. We have to really understand what the various phases of that mean. Today's a good day to be talking about this because we're on the one-year anniversary of the Precision Medicine Initiative. This administration has rolled out a few key areas in which we want to focus and really accelerate basic and advanced research and development in a way that we think the government has a unique role in doing. The Precision Medicine Initiative was something that emerged from a report that we did on big data, which some of you may be familiar with. It's called the Podesta Report. And that report, which I'll mention a few times, essentially concluded this, that big data and its era can be tremendously beneficial for consumers and for innovation, but at the same time that there is an essential role the government needs to play in ensuring that the harms that are potential in the big data space don't come and ultimately derail it. And I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. But Precision Medicine is a classic example of an area where advances in technology and advances in appropriate use of data and data science can dramatically accelerate, in this case, innovations that can save lives. It is, to me, an example of government at its best. It's dreaming big. It is marshaling resources, including over $1 billion to support this initiative in the President's fiscal year 17 budget. It's convening the best and the brightest in ways that only the White House and the administration can at times, and also it's driving coordinated action. And when it comes to driving coordinated action, I also want to draw attention to two other areas that we've had these sort of moonshot initiatives. One is the Cancer Moonshot Initiative, which the Vice President is leading on behalf of the President. And secondly, the Brain Initiative, which we have another $1.3 billion in our budget to try to support in order to dramatically accelerate neuroscience as an enabler to so much more that innovation can drive in our economy. These are the sorts of basic investments we can make, but there's more to it. That sort of convening, that sort of agenda setting can help dramatically accelerate where we are. And it's an essential role that government can play across a few key verticals as well as that underlying basic research and development, which needs to continue. So second, let me talk about infrastructure and access. It is easy to forget and also even easier to misquote the idea that the internet really is a series of tubes on some level. The internet has infrastructure. It is not just out there in the ether. Everyone around here knows that. And it's important to recognize that that infrastructure that leads to broadband, that leads to your mobile device in your pocket is essential and not going to build itself. And there is a tremendously important government role in helping to both create the conditions for private sector investment that have driven so much progress here. And we have seen tremendous progress, but there's also an incredible role that is important for us in terms of ensuring that that infrastructure is accessible to all. Let me talk about the former first. Obviously, government has a role in making sure that the tax code provides the right investment incentives. We can help catalyze private investment across new areas. And if you take the wireless case as a snapshot, the idea that the federal government is committed to make 500 megahertz available to mobile broadband. The fact that federal government has committed to ensure that we are as quickly as possible vacating certain elements of spectrum. That sounds wonky, but the results speak for themselves. A world in which when this administration began and we were in technology, 0% of Americans had access to 4G LTE technology. Today, over 98% of Americans have access to 4G LTE technology because of technological innovation, because of private sector driven growth, and because of the investments that they were making. In the wire line side, I think it's very fashionable in the United States to talk about how U.S. infrastructure doesn't match a place like Korea, a place like Korea that incidentally is the size of Michigan. The reality is that for the average American, your broadband speeds, wire line broadband speeds, have gone up by a factor of three over the course of the president's tenure, and that's only increasing. It's a story that's not often told. Now, did government play an important role in supporting some of that? Yes, during the Recovery Act, the worst economic downturn in our generation, there has been 114,000 miles of broadband infrastructure that was laid as part of the Recovery Act, largely a middle mile, largely not known to the average consumer, but leading to some of the middle mile and ultimately infrastructure build out that took place in the wireless space. And obviously, auctions, spectrum auctions that have been blockbusters both for the federal bottom line, delivering in just the last auction over $40 billion, but freeing up more of this wireless spectrum so that more and more demands are placed on our digital technology and on our mobile devices that we actually have the infrastructure to support it. Okay, so that's the good news. The bad news is that as this infrastructure has built out, there is no question that there is a pervasive digital divide in this country. The Council of Economic Advisers released a report on this that I'd really encourage all of you to read if you hadn't. It really goes through and in a data-driven way, documents what the digital divide looks like in America right now. Let me give you the snapshot that I think is most significant. There are two of them. The first is one that we've spent a lot of time focusing on and that's schools. In 2008, 2009, 2010, under one in three American schools had what we would consider to be even basic broadband connectivity. That means wired connectivity to the school and wireless within the school. One in three, which is pathetic. Secondly, there's a challenge that is an income-based disparity that continues to pervade American broadband connectivity. And that's a statistic that I thought was particularly shocking in the CEA report. And that is that if you are in the bottom income quintile, you are 10 times more likely to not have broadband to your home than if you're in the top income quintile. Think about that, 10 times more likely. Those numbers are striking. It means that under half of Americans in the bottom income quintile do not have access to broadband, to wireline broadband at home. So what that means is that there are two huge areas that the market is, for lack of a better term, failing. Or if you wanna think about this in public policy terms that the market is failing to serve and that we, the government need to ensure if we see it as a value that every American has the ability to get online for all the values and all the purposes that we've been talking about over the course of today that we have a role to fill that gap. And so when it comes to school broadband, two and a half years ago, the president announced something called ConnectEd. This is the president's technology and schools initiative and it had a pretty ambitious but pretty basic goal. Connect 99% of American schools to high-speed broadband and wireless within five years. It was built on top of actually a Clinton Arrow program that was a prescient one called E-Rate that recognized that there is no way to make the market of school broadband work. Schools are not going to be in the place of making the capital expenditure necessary to wire themselves with a fast broadband that is increasingly essential to delivering high quality teaching and learning. The numbers don't work. And that's why with the help of the FCC, the ConnectEd initiative and the E-Rate reforms that they undertook have actually delivered now committed over $8 billion of public sector funding to support school connectivity. The way the president put it is this, like in a country where we expect free wifi with our coffee, we should expect it in our schools. We need to demand it for our kids and that's what ConnectEd is all about because it recognizes that this question of whether or not kids can benefit from technology in the classroom is as settled as this question of whether small businesses can benefit from the efficiencies of technology behind their desk. This is a matter where the richest schools in the country are delivering this kind of connectivity, this kind of technology to help students be more engaged, to help deliver better pedagogy, to help teachers do their job better in a more efficient way. Those are the kinds of benefits that every student in this country demands. And so ConnectEd in two and a half years has delivered over this initiative connectivity to bring that under one third number up to 77%. ConnectEd has closed the digital divide in American schools by half in just two and a half years and we're well on our way to hitting 99%. So let me talk about a second area, this income disparity. One announcement we made recently is something called Connect Home. This is an initiative that focuses on a segment of those in the lowest income quintile and it's a particularly challenging one. It's individuals who live in public housing, public and assisted housing, who by and large do not have the connectivity that they need. And in many cases where the government, because the government is the provider of housing, creates additional challenges. Building codes aren't up to spec. It's not simple for HUD to put in or even to require that there be broadband connectivity in a public housing development. And so the Connect Home Initiative is focused on helping that bottom quintile, particularly in public and assisted housing, get connectivity where they live and to get it at a discounted rate. This is something that began in 27 cities and one tribal nation, that has already shown huge results across a number of them and is really improving day to day. I think there's actually a lot more to be heard on this in even the next month. So stay tuned and I really would encourage you to take a look at that CEA report. Let me just say this, access to connectivity is access to opportunity for the poor, for entrepreneurs and just think about the power that we heard about earlier today that it can deliver large businesses and small businesses alike and storage, processing, presence, payments, payroll. These are the sorts of things that were once the provenance of dozens of staff, hundreds of staff now are available to an individual behind a computer in every small business. It's true in tech, it's truer in tech, but it is increasingly true beyond tech. And so that may be the case, but only as long as the market conditions allow it. As with everywhere in the economy, the power of incumbency in the digital space and beyond is strong and it lies at the heart of why this president has and will continue to take and call for when appropriate bold action when necessary to keep the lanes of innovation open. It's important in the digital space, but it's as important in the broader economy as the digital economy becomes a crucial piece of infrastructure and enabler to every single area of our economy. Let me talk third briefly about skills and participation. I think there is a conventional wisdom here that in the worker displacement and automation space that we've simply seen a hollowing out of lower skilled jobs. And there's actually a really interesting report that just came out in the economic report to the president's chapter five. Those of you who don't have the ERP memorized that talks about the developments in the academic research on what it means to move towards a more automated economy and who's going to suffer from that the most? I think the conventional wisdom is those at the lowest side of the skills equation. I think there's been some really interesting development in the research that suggests it's both, it's created a hollowing out of that middle skill area, but the pace of it has not actually been consistent. And so I think we need to continue our research into exactly what this means obviously as we talk about what the sharing economy, what the gig economy, things like that mean, and you heard a lot about that today. There is a need, a dire need, for more and more up to date academic research on it. And if you want the state of the art, like I said, take a look at the economic report to the president chapter five. Interesting report also, McKinsey did something on this in November of 2015, which obviously helped bring us here today. At the same time, the government again has an essential role to play to make sure that those who are displaced, those who run the risk of displacement have the skills to participate and compete in the modern economy. So the added benefit of a digitally savvy workforce right is that these workers are already consumers. And so they can make more informed decisions than they have before. And we hope that that can translate into a more efficient, more effective, and ultimately more productive economy for workers. But at the same time, there are over a million vacancies in this country right now for tech-skilled jobs and far too few people who are capable of meeting them. That's why we announced something like the Tech Hire Initiative. This is a multi-city initiative designed to build together partnerships of a pipeline of skills that can lead to workers, some of whom will have community college degrees, some of whom will have non-degree granting skills, some of whom will go through traditional educational pipeline, but all of whom will be available to compete in the digital economy. And with those skills that might not be considered tech economy skills, but are increasingly important all across, think of the hospitality industry and beyond. It's also why we signed the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act in the summer of 2014 and why the president made a call that if you told me five years ago, he would make in the State of the Union what I said you were crazy. The president called for every American K-12 student to have access to computer science education. That's a sea change for the American discussion about what education means and it has the potential to really transform our workforce. So let me just conclude by talking about what I think are the two or three biggest challenges that we face, the sort of breaks in the tracks. The first is this notion that data is working against you and not for you. The second is privacy, both at home and abroad and the third is cybersecurity. I talked before about this big data report that we released and there are lots of conclusions to it. I don't want to shorthand it here except to say I think it's clear from the conversation that happened today and obviously a lot of us are having around the world right now that the opportunities of big data are immense. I talked about precision medicine. The list goes on and on. And yet at the same time, there is a clear sense that that proliferation of data can create significant challenges for the American consumer and for the American worker. There was a fascinating report that the Council of Economic Advisers released in February of 2015 about big data and differential pricing. I think this hits home for a lot of us. The idea that you might go to a website and based on a certain consumer profile that they have on you only offer you a subset of products. In some cases, that may be wonderful and tailored advertising right to you. In other cases, if it has to do with, for instance, a credit product, it actually could be tremendously harmful, particularly if that profile that's held on you correlates to race or to gender or more superficially to the type of browser you use. And so there are real interesting challenges that the idea of differential pricing can face for the American consumer that ultimately run the challenge of eroding the basic consumer confidence that we have spent the last 25 years developing in the digital economy. So there's not a question that when you're gonna go to a website that you're going to have the opportunity to purchase that product, that you're ultimately going to be able to transact safely even if you give your credit card number that you can give your name and address and that's not going to fall by the wayside. And that leads to the second challenge and one that could not be more salient right now and that is privacy. From the standpoint of the American consumer, that's important. From the standpoint of the American citizen, it is equally important. This is an area that has been really challenged over the course of the last couple of years. I don't wanna go through and do chapter and verse on every single privacy development, but let me just focus on one. Yesterday, if you need any more evidence of why this is important, the president, 430 p.m. in the Oval Office signed a bill called the Judicial Redress Act, which is about as wonky and legalistic as you can get. But that bill granted certain rights of judicial redress under the Privacy Act to certain designated foreign citizens that would otherwise be eligible for it on the basis of the existence of an existing commercial data sharing arrangement. What? This bill let EU citizens amend and correct their data and sue in court if the US government mishandles it. This is something, a bill, that grants important rights to what are now millions of consumers, but even more important than that, this bill took on a certain totemic influence in Europe. It was the bill that was essential to concluding something called the DPPA, which was a data sharing arrangement on law enforcement. It was essential in its progress to helping us conclude something called the Privacy Shield. You know it is safe harbor previously. This is a commercial data sharing arrangement that over 4,400 US companies relied on and that was responsible for smoothing over $300 billion of global economic trade. The message here is this, in any privacy space, a fortress is no longer good enough. A fortress in this globalized digital space in which we live is not the way in which to deliver services back to an individual consumer, whether they're inside your nation or beyond. And so high walls need to be married with open doors here. And that's a theme that you've seen over the course of not just the last few weeks in US-European relations, but actually over the course of the last couple of years. We took some unprecedented intelligence reforms in the world. Obviously this was in the context of the intelligence disclosures that took place. The president has implemented and signed into laws comprehensive reforms that I think it's worth reminding exist nowhere else, including in Europe right now. And this is a conversation that we've had obviously with our counterparts in Europe because there remains this duality, an incredibly important one between maintaining free flow of information and open borders for data while making sure that we're keeping the American people safe. And not just the American people safe, but our allies and partners abroad including in Europe. And so what you saw perhaps three or four years ago or even at the height of the Snowden disclosures was a sort of dialectic between American privacy and European privacy. That one is weak and the other is strong. What you're seeing now is a period of mutual recognition. A recognition that the US has privacy laws, that Europe has privacy laws, that they're both strong, they work differently. And that if we're going to have a future of an economy that interoperates with itself and with one another, that those systems have to recognize one another's strength and to continue to move forward. So we've seen some really important developments on that front. So let me just close on what I think is a cautionary note as I'm sure has come up several times and seems to be the theme right now which is cybersecurity. Let me just take a little consumer angle on this. Right now, I'm sure most of you have seen this data, nine in 10 Americans based on pupiling, nine in 10 Americans feel like they have lost control over their data. And can you blame them right with breaches which are obviously not just private sector breaches but they've heard about Target, they've heard about Anthem Blue Cross, they've heard about JP Morgan Chase, they've heard about OPM and they've seen just on the private sector side alone, 675 million records breached and that number actually strikes me as a little low but that's the number that's in here, 675 million. If you were an American consumer right now, you would if not have a sense of panic and if nothing else you'd have a sense of what I call cybersecurity fatalism. The idea that your information is out there and you don't have the kind of control over it you want but there's nothing you can do about it. And if you're a business, I think this is equally true. And so what we're seeing is that good cybersecurity particularly in light of Target, Target a company that has a new CEO now after their breach, good cybersecurity is no longer just the cost of doing business, it is the cost of staying in business. That is going to be a theme across I think increasing number of sectors in our economy and if you look to the government side as well, there's no question that we have a unique role in ensuring that a crisis of cybersecurity does not become a crisis in consumer confidence. And it really has the potential to do that if we don't act. So obviously we've taken a number of steps. Recently the president just unveiled his cybersecurity national action plan. This is the culmination of over seven years worth of work on this issue. It calls for among other things a 19 billion dollar cybersecurity surge fund to rip out a lot of this old technology outdated computers that in many cases are the root cause of why on the federal side we have so many cybersecurity challenges. I know a lot of businesses face the same challenge at the same time, but there's more to it than that. There's among other things calls for reorganization. There's a smarter way of applying the notion of cybersecurity within agencies so that instead of having for instance the US park service, a national park service handling its own cybersecurity, maybe that's something you can outsource to the pros elsewhere in government to have certain shared services that you're sharing across government. Again, this is taking best practice in industry and porting it over to government and innovating at that pace. At the same time, we also recognize that in the last 11 months of this administration we're not going to solve all of the nation's cybersecurity challenges even for the government side. And so we put together a national cybersecurity commission that's gonna be co-chaired by Tom Donilon, the former national security advisor to deliver recommendations that are primarily geared at the next administration. To take stock of what we've done to recognize those areas that we have not done enough and what we can do in the government both to improve federal cybersecurity and even more importantly what we can do to enable better security in the private sector whether it's through investments, whether it's through better coordination, whether it's through better information sharing or what have you. So in all those ways there is no question that we have entered a world where technology is not just a public policy space that is relegated to a few. I think groups like this and events like this show that this is now core to the future of trade policy, the future of our economic development, more than just what we'd consider traditionally to be Silicon Valley issues. And that the digital world if it ever was distinct is no longer. It is the world of day-to-day economics. It is why so many of us are working on these issues all the time. But those benefits are not going to be fully realized on the private sector and they're not gonna be fully realized by a huge number of the American public let alone the global public. If we don't recognize that there is still a role, an enduring role for government in making those costly basic R&D investments in ensuring that infrastructure is in place and shared by everyone in ensuring that we have access for those who are squeezed out whether that's because of their parents zip code and the incomes that their parents had or because of a corporation that decides they don't want a shoulder competition. And at the same time we have to ensure that the hardest policy challenges that we face that those hiccups do not become paroxysms in the fragile growth of our digital economy. There are many, they're multiplying but I think we are in good shape through conversations like this to move it forward. So thank you very much. Have a good day. Thank you.