 So, welcome to New America Foundation. For those of you that don't know me, my name is Sasha Meinrath, and I run the Open Technology Institute here. New America is sort of a, what we call it, sort of a pan-partisan think tank spanning a lot of different issues from budget and fiscal debt to health care, and of course telecom and spectrum and broadband in particular. And today, we're going to be talking about some of my favorite issues of all time. In fact, these are issues that brought me to Washington, D.C., and I can say five years later that I'm still cautiously optimistic in spite of what I'm about to say, which is that, you know, when I look at the last several years, and I've only been through three chairmen now, but, you know, when I look at television whitespace, dynamic spectrum access, unlicensed, additional unlicensed spectrum, these are all kind of stalled out right now. It's not that we're losing these battles, it's just that we're not really making a lot of headway in them. When I look at low power FM radio, you know, we've had this 10-year battle to get back to where we were at around the turn of the millennium. And when I look at the national broadband plan, the national broadband map, and current broadband measurement efforts, three areas that we've been integrally involved in since the very get-go, I'm kind of shocked. I'm shocked by what passes for mission accomplished here in D.C. vis-a-vis what the reality is internationally. When you can blame the FCC, I certainly would lay blame at the feet of certain members of the FCC, and you can blame kind of the nepotism and the revolving door that is quite explicit at the FCC. But I would actually say that our role is really to demand more of ourselves, to demand more of Republicans and Democrats alike, to actually formulate kind of what it is that we are going to do to fix things, both at places like the FCC but also on our own. And I think one of the problems, you know, I think about this in terms of my two-year-old now, it seems like a lot of life now revolves around her. And if I were to praise her as much as we do the FCC, if I were to give her a free pass every time she throws a temper tantrum or does something that's thoroughly unacceptable, I'd end up with a really petulant spoiled child. And I kind of feel like, yeah, the FCC sort of acts like a spoiled brat a lot of the times. It wants praise. It gets really angry when you withhold praise. And so I would say that the FCC actually needs better parenting. And when I look at AT&T, like they're not going to do it. When I think about like Comcast, National Association of Broadcasters, I'm like they clearly are not going to do it. And so for better and worse, it's sort of our responsibility to add that kind of guidance. And so that's why I'm excited for the gathering that's here today. Because when I think about where this form of advice and guidance, a framework that the FCC so desperately needs is going to come from. It's going to come from the people here in this room. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Ellen to kick off the awesomeness that's about to transpire. And I very much look forward to today's discussions. Thank you. Okay, the awesomeness begins with Larry Irving. And we're especially delighted that he could join us today and provide some introductory perspective on our topic. Larry now runs an international telecom consulting firm, the Irving Information Group. His public service includes almost seven years as administrator of the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration, NTIA, where he was a principal advisor to President Clinton and Vice President Gore on IT and telecom issues during a period of fundamental change to telecom regulations and the birth of the Internet. In that role, he was all about making markets more efficient and also resolving the occasional failure of markets to serve the underserved in rural and poor America. In fact, Larry is widely credited with coining the term digital divide and with devising strategies to close it. Now, the Talmud tells us that you don't have to complete the work, but neither are you at liberty to desist from it. Larry didn't complete the work of closing the digital divide, but nor has he desisted from trying to. He's going to talk a little bit about what he sees on the ground in terms of social and public interest imperatives in today's wireless world. And then after that, in the first panel, we'll talk about how we might understand some of these imperatives as we migrate from broadcast to broadband environments. Larry. It's like a homecoming for me to come here today to see so many people I've worked with or worked for in this room. Bonnie is sitting in the front row and Bonnie and I did some great work working with Secretary Ron Brown with the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Committee. Only government can come with a title like that. Normally I try to read my comments off of my mobile device, but as I've gotten older I have more eye problems. I'm going to actually go back to paper. I printed out this morning because I realized I couldn't see that and I couldn't get the font high enough. And I'm also going to take off my glasses so if I don't make eye contact, it's not that I don't love you. I've been having some eye problems recently. I want to thank the New America Foundation and Rutgers and I want to commend Sasha and Michael for the work that they've done with the Wildest Future Initiative and the Open Technology Initiative. And I particularly want to thank my good friend, Fessa Goodman, for inviting me here today. We've been friends for just about two decades. I admire her so much for her work, for her intellect and particularly her character. She didn't mention, but I will, that I tried to steal her from a law firm she was working with about 35 times. She kept telling me no and the government's loss was academia's gain. Because she's done some remarkable work since leaving Washington and while she was in Washington. Let me start with a caveat that you have to when you're a consultant. I have a lot of clients. They're on all sides of every issue. And so any comments I make this morning are purely my own. I sit on PBS's board. I work with some carriers. I have some individual companies. But most of my different clients have very different perspectives. From broadcast to broadband. I wanted to change it from Brooklyn to broadcast to broadband and you'd probably have my life. I was born in Brooklyn in the projects. And I like to tell people that because I think it's a testimony to America that you can be born in Brooklyn in 1955 in the projects and have had the kind of opportunities I've had. And most of my life has been about trying to make sure that every kid wherever they're born in Brownsville, New York or Brownsville, Texas, has the same opportunities that I've had. I started 30 years ago working for Mickey Leland. And then I went on to Ed Markey. And then I went on to the Clinton Gore administration. And then I did a dot com with Magic Johnson. And I have my consulting firm. And almost all of it's been about the same thing. There is so much the technology can do. And how can we do it better and do it better for more people? The promise of broadband technology I think gets as closest to the realization of what we want. But we're not there yet. But I think we can get there. I think we can get there together. And I worry that far too often we're fighting each other instead of pulling together. And that's why this conference day is so critically important, why it's at a critically important time. I was up till 2 o'clock in the morning talking to some friends, actually about 1.30, and then thinking until 2, talking to friends out in the valley. I spend about half my time of my life outside of Washington. And I spent about half of that time either in New York or in New York. If you didn't think I was in New York, there you go. In New York or in Silicon Valley. I went to school in the valley, have a lot of friends in the valley, and until a year ago I worked for Hewlett-Packard running the global government affairs. So last night I was on a phone with a friend who's a serial entrepreneur out in the valley. And earlier this weekend and last week I was talking to some medical technologists that I met in New York City. And then I was talking last week with a young man I met from Brownsville, Texas, who I met itself by Southwest. He's facing most of the same problems that folks in my hometown in Brownsville, New York are facing. Except in New York it's increasingly African-Americans, Hasidic Jews, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in Brownsville, Texas, it's disproportionately folks who speak Spanish because they're Mexican-American. And then over the last two days I participated or attended a series of conferences. And each one of those conferences I was thinking about this conference because I knew I was talking to friends and people I know and respect. Last Friday there was a conference on spectrum at an inflection point. What are we going to do about spectrum? How are we going to get more spectrum into the system? Then I was at a conference last week. If you look at what's happening in this country with obesity, one of the worst things about obesity is that it's creating a society of diabetics. And I was at a conference on diabetes design where people are using technology to fight diabetes in really, really compelling and provocative ways. And then yesterday I was over at an entertainment software association, Mike Gallagher, my successor at NTIA runs, and they invited me to give a talk on, to be on a panel, talk about edtech. At their core, every one of these conferences is about the same thing, they're about broadband. And more specifically, they were about mobile broadband. And how do we marshal the power of broadband to affect economic change, change in health care outcomes, and change in educational and economic opportunity? The first speech I ever wrote, for anyone, was regarding the public interest. And that was for Congressman Mickey Leland, who was then about to become chairman of the Black Caucus. That was in 1983, it was almost 30 years ago. And I remember vividly sitting up on a Saturday night in February of 1987, snowing outside, I'm sitting in House Annex II, and I was writing a speech for Ed Markey on exactly the same thing, the public interest. It was February 1987, and Ed was giving a speech about Everett Parker. And all of us who know of the great work, anything we're doing today, we're standing on the shoulders of Ed Parker, he probably did more about the public interest than anybody we can ever hope to think about. For both Ed and for Mickey, for Ron Brown, my subsequent boss, public interest standard mattered. And there were three critical things. And I don't care how you transform the language or how you move things around, there are basically three things we're talking about when we're talking about the public interest standard. Universal service, diversity, and localism. Anything you do, if you pull out, you may tweak it, you may change it around. But that's really what we're talking about. Diversities, diversity of views, diversity of voices, diversity of owners, and diversity in the employment pool. You know, when we were able in 1984, Mickey Leland, Tim Worth, Cardis Collins get EEO regulations that were really meaningful in the Cable Act, it had a spillover effect into lots of industries. And a lot of the folks you see, Black, Brown, and women who are doing great things today, got their start because of those kind of work that Mickey and Cardis did. The focus on universal service led to work on lifeline telephone service and extending the reach of broadcasting to rural areas. And then later in my career, the work I did in the Digital Divide, that came right out of what I was taught by Mickey Leland with regard to universal service. And then localism has been critical to tying communities together, promoting local perspectives and views, and serving the needs of disparate and discreet communities. It's all pretty straightforward. It's kind of out of the textbook. But those goals are as critical today as they were then. And a broadband revolution, particularly the mobile revolution, has helped us realize so many of those almost aspirational goals. I mean, I go back to Brooklyn 15 years ago in Brooklyn, 20 to 30 percent of the households in my community, where I grew up, didn't have a phone in that home. Today, 88 percent of America has a mobile phone. There are 323 million smartphones connecting 311 million Americans. I've got two phones and an iPad with me. I've also got a MiFi in my briefcase. So I'm doing my part with just, I actually have another phone that I don't carry, because I want all the carriers to, when I see my friends, when I go see Tom Shiguri at T-Mobile, when I go see Vine, I want to have one of my friends, but I have these phones because they have different purposes and they serve different roles, but also candidly because living in Washington, depending on where I am, I may need the different phones because of spectrum crunch. But we'll get into that in a minute. We've connected, when I talk with those 323 smartphone, million smartphones, that's not laptop, that's not, you know, this year alone, we're going to sell 100 million tablets, 100 million tablets across the globe this year alone. And tablets didn't exist three years ago. When I first started talking about the digital divide in 1995, one out of 10 households were connected. Today, 88% of people have a mobile device and most of those devices connect to the net. Virtually everybody, except for folks who for whatever reason just, we haven't been able to get the message to them that they need to be connected, can be connected, maybe not the speeds we want, maybe not the way we want, we can connect them. But the best thing about what we've done is for the first time, communities aren't just content consumers, they're content creators. Some of you are my Facebook friends and you know I post a lot, and some of you are my Twitter feed, you know I post a lot. But what I'm trying to post, what I'm trying to bring for people who aren't going to do as much reading as I do, what's happening with regard to laying a lesbian, gay, transgender issues on the line, what's happening with the black community, where's happening with regard to the entrepreneurial community. I'm trying to pull my disparate communities into one community and I'm just one person doing it. You multiply that effect out there. When each one of us hits the people we care about and lets them know all the issues they should be thinking about, it gets really exciting. I have friends in China, friends in Rome, my friends in Australia, and it's interesting the comments I get back from folks, I wouldn't have known that if you hadn't posted that. I'm just one chronicler. Imagine what's happening and when I look at young people, when I was at the educational technology session yesterday watching these young people become creators, understanding they can create a game, that they can put their own story up there, it takes me back my days at NCHIA when we first connected some schools and a young girl said I love the internet because it's not just a window to the outside world, but I can open up that window and tell my story myself. That's the power of what we're doing. But we're also, that's what we wanted, that's what we fought for and diversity, we've never had more diverse voices across every segment of media. Not what we want to be, but what's wonderful about the net is that it removes the barriers to entries and the gatekeepers for the most part. YouTube last, yesterday 72 hours of video were uploaded every minute. When you look at the subscribe channels on YouTube, eight of the top 20 are minority programmed stations and 20 to 30 of the top 50 depending upon the day are also minority generated or minority focused. We've got a long way to go but trending in the right direction because what you have to remember, these audience are disproportionately young people, they you know appointment television is dead. I mean I'm on PBS's board and I have these conversations with my colleagues all the time. I watched Down to Naby, I didn't watch it on TV, I watched it on this. I watched it, you know I'm sitting on a train, I'm sitting on a plane, I'm downloading down in WTA, I'm watching this, I got to watch it and I enjoyed watching it, didn't tell too many people in Brooklyn I was watching it, but I did enjoy it, but I watched, I watched more programming on this thing than I watch on my television at home because when I'm at home I'm usually online. So for me this has been a three decades long journey and I imagine what Congressman Leal and the Secretary Brown would have thought if I told them in the 80s of the 90s what the broadband revolution and particularly wireless broadband revolution would bring. In 15 years we've engaged and empowered tens of millions of Americans who always are apt to thoughts under the old paradigm. I'm going to go back to those folks I talked about at the beginning of my comments. What do they want? And I think I know because I'm preparing for this talk I asked them. Let me be honest, they think that not just politicians in Washington are the problem, but Washington is the problem. They think that this environment is toxic, the ones who come here the most often think it's the most toxic, and they think we get bogged down and intramural squabbles, that we get these thousand year wars, we get grudges, we get ad hominem, somebody ticked us off didn't hire us didn't do something and we're still mad 15 years later we're going to make them pay forever. They see thousand ideological wars and they want us to continue to support progress and get over ourselves. Now to my mind is one huge impediment to the progress we've just we've just seen and that's the need to address the looming spectrum scarcity. Because the whole issue everything we've talked about in terms of telecom has always been about scarcity and then we've talked about abundance and then we ran into laws of physics and the laws of economics of building out infrastructure and we hit a crunch. 230% increase in mobile data last year. 200, we went 2x. My wife is one, I love her to death, she's 37 years she's put up with me, she still carries a feature phone. How anybody can still carry a basic feature phone and be married to me, I don't understand but she does and I think maybe because she's married to me she does. This phone uses nine times more bandwidth than her feature phone and this thing does 3x more than this thing and I'm not really that much of a power user in terms of you know compared to some of my friends because I've not hit a cap alright so at least I'm doing enough to say well actually I may or may not be true because I'm grandfather but I check and I wouldn't hit caps even if I wasn't grandfathered. We've got to get more spectrum in the hands of the public and the greatest spectrum, the greatest opportunity is the government. Now NTI runs a government spectrum and I ran NTI longer than anybody so I know what we have to do when I was at NTIA I didn't do it because I wanted to I did it because I was told to we gave up 235 megahertz and found hundreds of additional megahertz for sharing. Now I love Anna Gomez and I love Larry Strickling they have a really difficult job. We found the low hanging fruit in the 90s they've got to find some fruit in in in 2013 it's going to be harder but two things I want to talk about we gave up a 10-year span to do 500 megahertz. We've got to speed up that folks 500 megahertz over 10 years is really 500 megahertz over 15 or 20 years because first you have to find it then you got to locate it then you got to move people out of it then you got to move people into it then you got to build infrastructure. If we really say what we're trying to do is 500 megahertz given the needs of this country over over 10 years we're talking about 20 years. It's going to require the White House not through oblique comment but through actual action to get involved and to intercede. Now let me tell you about being an assistant secretary and there are two cool things about being an assistant secretary. One is occasionally get to fly with the secretary of commerce and you get off a plane with the flag United States on some foreign country and there's nothing cooling walking down the stairs with the secretary behind the secretary that's great. The second coolest thing you get a flag. You may not know this but if you're an assistant secretary of the department you get a flag. I had my little flag hanging in my office and I loved that flag. I didn't buy that flag because I was an idiot but I had a flag. You know there are mornings now like why didn't I buy that flag and I was leaving government I didn't buy it and so I so wish like on a good summer day I could hang it outside my house and wave my little assistant secretary flag but when you go to Boulder Colorado assistant secretary they do fly your flag if you there's a picture of me under my flag loved it. Your flag rank but when you're dealing with spectrum you're dealing with other people a flag rank generals and and and admirals and they have flags too but they also have guns and they also have stars in their shoulders so when you go to them and say they want their their spectrum they're not happy to see you and they're going to obfuscate and they're going to take a very long time to give it up. We have to make sure that our warfighters the people protect our homeland that our first responders have adequate spectrum there's no denying that but there's also no denying that we've not done an adequate job of inventory or getting spectrum out into the hands of people who need it. When we were trying to get the internet into the government in 1995 Al Gore called a meeting with cabinet officers per Bill Clinton's instructions we all sat in a room and Al Gore said in three months I want you to tell me how you're going to use the internet better what you're going to do in the agency are you going to serve your customers better and I want you to come back to me in three months. I wish the White House would bring the cabinet officers together and say I want you to do a spectrum inventory I want a real cost allocation OMB and CBO are going to actually say the 18 billion maybe it's right maybe it's wrong but let's know what the real cost is and you're going to tell us how you're going to give the American people and the people you work for as a government official enough spectrum to both both things if we don't have that kind of level no assistant secretary no secretary of commerce can do it by themselves you're going to need and if we talk about 500 magnitude of 10 years you're talking 20 we've got all kinds of problems in terms of what we're going to need. Now that's the approach on the government side let's talk about the progressive community side of which I'm proud to be a part of I want everyone in this room to follow the advice of Steve Jobs I think different we don't need a new theory of public interest some things are just classic a 1964 Ford Mustang a Chanel little black dress Marvin Gaye is what's going on when you have a woman with a shell little black dress somewhere in oh I'm sorry you can tweak them you can change them but you're not going to improve them we're not going to improve the public interest standard it stands the test of time but we need to think again about the best way to achieve our collective goals we need to think about how we're going to not just continue but propel our technological progress because I believe the technology out outstrips everything we're going to do in terms of policy we're going to need on license and commercial solutions to drive innovation and connectivity and to build the national networks we don't have the money at the local national or federal level to build the infrastructure we need to continue the momentum we have in broadband and in the present toxic political environment here in Washington in the hemorrhaging state budgets that situation is not going to change soon I love unlicensed technology I use unlicensed technology I think is an important part of what we're going to do but I also think that license technology is as important and we have this fundamental fight if we can get more spectrum from the government and get that put that spectrum to work we can stop having these these fights we expand the pie rather than figuring out who's going to fight over what slices over the pie we don't have a business model that I've seen for rural and getting what we need to do in rural including WISP we're going to need to work on that and when I talk to some folks in Brooklyn and in Brownsville there's a little bit of a disconnect with regard to our focus on on license as progressives it doesn't work as well and not at at risk communities and let me explain to you why if you're black and brown or black or brown and poor and I go back to these neighborhoods at Christmas so I know this and I have families still there and I know what's going on it looks like you'd have wide broadband at home you have limited access at public facilities schools and public libraries and wives hometown and home would rush in and libraries open one night a week the schools aren't open for public access there's little if any commercial Wi-Fi in most of those communities it's not a Starbucks there aren't these great things so what happens in Cambridge what happens in Dupont Circle what happens in Palo Alto doesn't work if you're talking about Queens you're talking about Brownsville you're talking about Brownsville, Texas so when you constrain commercial providers the people you may be pointing at big commercial providers you are hitting low income people I don't know anybody who doesn't have access to this if they want it in my family or in my community I do know lots of folks who don't have access to unlicensed spectrum that's free in their neighborhood unless they're going to Bryan Park or they're going to Prospect Park and most of the time it's those same providers who are providing those hotspots free the commercial providers aren't doing what needed to be done and there isn't enough public facilities there so the criticism that I'm hearing from outside of Washington is that we're so busy fighting battles over and over again that we're not thinking outside the box look at the last 10 years Google, YouTube, Facebook Apple's iPad and iPhone each of them won because they thought outside the box people said you can't do it and they did it differently there's a sense that that within Washington if and this is what I was told last night from somebody who's name you'd know if you give me the name of the speaker I can tell you what he or she is going to say before he or she says it I had a conversation the guy who comes to DC said if I gave him the name or affiliation of a DC panelist he could write their speech put it in an envelope open it after the speech and be 80 percent sure that what he said they were going to say they actually said that's insanity why aren't any of us thinking differently and getting you know we shouldn't be put in boxes we need to figure out new ways of addressing the issues we're all trying to face new times require new thinking and new approaches let me give you one example 15 years ago 14-15 years ago we talked about a laptop in every backpack even Newt Gingrich said that's the idea that's what we're going to go for and I remember Tom Wheeler who's then head of NCIA CTIA when it failed in Congress Tom said Newt fell but he fell forward he didn't fall maybe we won't go there but he fell but he didn't but he fell forward so Obama transition as there's too often a case in technology circles I was the only person of color in the room I was probably the only person who we've been born for I was with a bunch of Ivy League academics so all transition people or people they've transitioned and invited in and we're talking about how are we going to address some issues of connectivity in education and everybody in the room except me said laptop and backpack laptop and I said no dudes why aren't we talking about wireless technology why aren't we talking this the ipad the iphone had come out the ipad hadn't but iphone was clearly their apps were on the horizon we've just seen them I said let's think a little differently let's use and I said come with me to a playground in shore let's go to Anacost let's go up to Bed-Stuy the brothers and sisters have these they don't have that and they don't have it because they don't want it right now I was talking to a friend of mine in Pittsburgh my wife's from Pittsburgh Comcast is having a hard time selling a $10 broadband to the home it's not because people are stupid it's because they made a different choice they decided that they want to use wireless rather than use the broadband lines I commend Julius what he did I commend Comcast what they're doing but you sometimes have to meet people where they are rather than where you think they want to be so we spent this time talking about laptops and backpacks instead of trying to figure out how we can use these things and these things more effectively where would we be if we spent three and a half years as a community thinking differently working with Apple working with the carriers and figuring out how to use these to their best practical effect I think events prove me right and I don't want to gloat I'm kind of sad for the time we've wasted we have a chance right now to drive momentum we have a chance to marshal all about national resources and providers and furtherance of a shared belief in the public interest Australia came up with a gigaband network and what I told when he did that is the most important thing is in the network it's what rides on top of the network it's the apps it's the ideas it's the technologies and it's the same thing here if we can build out these networks that we can let people free up the American people in the global community to drive what we want instead of trying to manufacture it here in Washington or through policy networks matter and we've got to make the investment we've got to start thinking how are we going to get hundreds of billions of dollars of investment what's the right way to do that and don't think about intramural squabbles think about that kid in Brownsville think about those folks trying to cure diabetes out in New York think about that Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur who just wants a network that'll work that when he's standing at Menlo Park in Hanover using a commercial network he can't talk to his wife much less send out a digital stream on social media Sasha talked about his two-year-old daughter and it reminded me of a story about a young girl and her dad dad came home from work and he was told by his little daughter it's a little bit older than Sasha's girl and the daughter told him that Esther the turtle was dead and the dad tried to console his daughter because she didn't know what death was the first time she'd been exposed to death and he said I know what we'll have a funeral a little girl looked up at daddy and said to daddy what's the funeral and dad explained we're going to invite all your friends over and we're going to tell funny stories and joke about Esther's life and we're going to have cake and we're going to have punch everybody's going to have a great time and we're going to remember Esther for the great little turtle that she was and just as the little girl was getting excited Esther moved and the dad looked and said Esther's alive and the little girl looked at and said daddy let's kill her what do we try the point of that story and here's the point to that story is Esther's alive Esther's in the momentum about entrepreneurs Esther's in the vibrancy of our conversation but we need every every part of our economy pulling toward this I want all of you to continue working in the public interest but I want all of us to get outside of our boxes I spend most of my time as I mentioned to to mark into Ellen outside of Washington and I do it purposely I do it because the environment here the ad hominem the ad hoc attacks on personal why people do things why they say they think they do it gets very old let's fight to make this a better country let's fight in the public interest let's use the momentum and the technology that we have to really serve the public interest let's go back to those touchstones if you put three touchstones I'm listening to a story about this morning that I was leaving the house Senate Secretary Powell General Powell was on TV and he had aphorisms in his desk he put little sayings if you put public interest universal service and localism and the power of the public interest on your desk and you work every day toward those goals and you stop thinking that you know that everybody else in the world isn't working to those goals we can get some great things done but we're not going to get it done unless we start realizing that we don't have all the answers in Washington the private sector has an important role to say and that personality shouldn't trump progress thank you very much