>> up next on the "communicators," a conversation on policy and regulations, then in 30 minutes on c-span2, officials from the american civil liberties union and microsoft testify about online consumer privacy. after that, writer and actor, harry shearer on hurricane a katrina, and then liter, a discussion on the muslim brotherhood in egypt. >> the communicators is on

location at the 7th annual state of the net conference spoon tored by the internet caucus of congress. joining us now is dr. william laer where he's a researcher on the internet futures program. first of all, what is the communication futures program? >> communications future program is an attempt to look across the value chain of the internet, so from equipment providers to service providers to application providers, and not just in the u.s., but internationally. we work together, several schools at mit with industry partners, internationally and domestically on issues confronting the internet and ideas to technology aware business strategy and business strategy aware in technology and bridge that gap. >> what are you thinking about

most these days? >> well, with the internet, there's a lot of things to think about. me, personally, i think about wireless issues, and i come out of a regulatory economics research background, so i'm especially interested in all of the sort of nontech any call side of policy and business strategy and how that interarguments with the -- interacts with the internet. how do we ensure healthy internet climate and how do we design architectures and the internet spectrums are what i think about recently. >> we'll get into that in just a min, but when you graduated from your first college, university of pennsylvania, you graduated in the era of flop y disks and dialup modems, what did you see in the future in 1969?

>> you know, at the time, you know, the notion that we would be getting to something like more what we have today, lots of people talked about it. if you were interested in technology, you could see it. if i had been asked to make predictions, the likelihood that the predictions would be been absolutely wrong, would have been 100%. it wasn't just me, it was people actually making predierkses at the -- predictions at the time. while you could read which we couldn't have done in 1984 or 1994, but we're damn close to being able to do in 2004. those images and the possibility of that information everywhere and know all these sorts of things, people were certainly talking about. >> let's talk bouts privacy then, privacy on the internet. is the cow out of the barn at this point?

too late to close the door? >> well, and i think from a practice kl point of view, the horse is out of the barn. even though the horse is traveling out of the barn, you might want to hang on the reigns and slow it down. i think what it means is we've got to the point with technology where anybody who wants to know anything about you can if they are willing to do it, and protecting someone's ability to know something about you is probably not feasible. we can design technologies to make it better to use it. we need to focus on how the information is used and really reconstruct, and this is a social debate in addition to a technical debate, what about privacy do we care about, and what do we want to preserve? i think it's a dialogue. there's a lot of things people don't understand. for example, a lot of what you want from the new technology in terms of customization, seemless, self-configuration,

applications working the way i want them to work, depending on the people knowing a lot of applications, knowing things about you, that if you knew, you would say, i'm concerned about that. i think one the first things to do is get people more aware of what other folks know and disclosure so people understood like, you know, what information do you know about me, and can i check that? those are some of the principles where you get the best sort of policy initiatives. >> do you bank online? >> i bank online. i do all this stuff online, and, you know, part of it again is because i realize that one, if i were to sort of avail myself of the privacy options that i have, and there are a lot of people at mit, for example, that are extremely paranoid because they know. they will not bank online. it is just too inconvenient not to do that, and one of the things i do is i'm lots of people online.

go find the real me. i have probably 40-50 e-mail addresses. if you google me, you'll find me, but ten versions of me that are not me. >> you talked about the fact that your research focuses on the regulatory environment. we're here in washington. generally, how would you describe the regulatory environment right now? >> i think it's an environment that's in transition. i organized a workshop with international support back in 1998 on focusing on, hey, we need to think about internet policy into the future. you know, the largest sort of regulatory phenomena happened in the west is the notion that markets do a better job than centralized planning, the whole kind of like the soviet union pre-1989 bad good, capitalism good idea and i agree with the whole economics profession agrees with that with a few outliers, but that's not to say

no regulations. markets are regulated differently. we have to struggle through how to differently regulate. we're in a big transition that's ongoing from all the traditional media, so cable television, broadcast, telecommunications. we're not in the position to tear that regulatory house done completely saying we want nothing there, but we haven't yet figured out how to map this to the internet which is the new pstn, the new infrastructure we want to think about how to regulate. i'd like to see that done in a way that's responsive to market processes, but i think that means thinking that there is a role for the public regulation. it's a question of how tiew it. you know, what is light handed regulation? it can't be no regulation. that's not realistic politically, and it's not a fact. we need to embrace there needs to be something affirmative and think about what that is. >> is the fcc versatile and

regulated enough to -- limited enough to regulate the world? >> i don't think there's a perfect institution here, and there are a number of players in the stake. for example, the standard bodies, other sorts of quasi-market based organizations have a role to play as well as international body. in the u.s., looking at the regulatory authority, and i say who is the one that's the most up to speed and in the best position to do this, i think it's the federal communications commission. i don't want to destroy the federal communications commission and create something else. that having been said, i think we need to think about, you know, what is the right role for the federal communications commission, and, you know, what authority should it be operating under? >> what about international regulation given the worldwideness of the net? >> well, i mean, we don't do a particularly great job of international regulation of anything, you know, from

international slave, you know the trafficking of humans and all that sort of stuff. i don't think most people are comfortable, for example, like the u.n. regulating the internet. i think a lot of people sort of old internet hands are happy with the sort of nongovernmental organizations that have done this in the past, but i think there are real questions about whether or not they scale, and all of the current sort of, you know, if you said k okay, what's international agency would do this, the itu? all you have to do is say that in an industry forum among people who understand working what the tiu is like, and there's a collective grown. i think the industry needs to be very proactive because i don't think it's a reasonable position for them to take that, you know, they can essentially push off any regulation or cooperation forever, and they need to think -- they need to help the people that don't want it to be something like the itu or the

u.n.. give them alternatives to work with. >> when we hear from business there, they ask for certainty. they ask for the rules so play by the rules and they know what the rules are. there's rules here in the u.s., e.u., china, iran. >> certainly, regulatory uncertainty, pure randomness is a deterrent to investment. you know, there's nothing certain, and we change things all the time. i think that the notion that, you know, setting forth a framework, there's different sorts of things that can be changed. for example, the net neutrality principles that were spoused by colin powell at the time i didn't think at at time that made sense or had a lot of teeth. i wasn't in favor of them. go forward a few years, you find those principles everybody agrees with. nobody came out and said basically people shouldn't have

access to use content that is legal, that they shouldn't be able to attach devices that wouldn't hurt the thing, and they should have choice. everybody accepted that. the question then is what do you do beyond that? i think the fcc in december's order was attempting to move forward. i think that's an ongoing dialogue. i think the fcc has a role to play in it. i was sort of not terribly comfortable with the original, for example, fcc rules an nondiscrimination ultimately because i didn't think they were enforceable. they get you into other problems like, you know, they beg more questions than to answer. what's the service, what's the internet, you know, is interconnection part of the access? can you regulate access without regulating interconnection? a bunch of other questions come up that we're not in a good position politically or even technically sort of to figure out one answer, so i think if

you looked at those principles and said, okay, i'm not sure what these mean, but i think i can tell you about egregious examples and everybody says that violates these. are there plenty of examples of gray area close to the principles i don't know how to adjudicate? yeah. the question is are those problems we have to deal with right now? i think the answer is no. >> dr. william lehr, the die ma'am irk -- dynamic of a house of representatives, what does that add? >> ideally, i hope nothing because historically communication policies is largely nonpart san. if, for example, this is a partisan issue, it would be bad communications policy. if there are positive things that, for example, the tea party or the republicans come in, and i think looking really hard at things like universal service reform, there's an $8 billion entitlement. it makes no sense to me.

no economist can look at this for this to be an entitlement program for telephone service. the idea you need to access people's information for telephone, you don't need to do that. people will buy phones by taking food out of their kids' mouths. if they do that, it's a different problem. there are poor people out there. you need to think what the nature of the program is. if you take the program and up vest in broadband and basic infrastructure, move that over, does it need to be $8 billion? i seriously question that. certainly, should i refocus? yes. i hope like the tea party would help us think about those questions hard and say, that, no, no, just doing business as it's been, here's a opportunity to take a big fat cow and justify itself or cut it up and sell it as meat. >> what's the next revolution in technology that you're concentrating on? >> well, there's a bunch.

i think one area i'm personally interested in is wireless, but that's one step towards the next really big challenge from a powerful point of view which is, you know, we've managed to sort of take with the internet data communications for everybody in tieing computers, so everybody is on computers, and with wireless we have mobiles. everybody is connected everywhere on the internet, at least in principle. in making sure everybody is is what policy is about. the next really big thing is taking the real world and hook it up with the cyber world. when we have that, we have computers in this environment making more decisions for us, which is already happening. i mean, you know, when you walk into a store through a door, you look at the hood of your car, there's electronics, and john q. public doesn't know how to fix it. it's not like when i was in college and i could lift the hood of my car and badly replace

a water pump. today, i don't know where the water pump is. many, many more decisions are made by computers on our behalf, and are we comfortable with how the decisions are made, the dj designed to implement those, where the connection points are, all this sort of stuff. >> currently, is this consistent between wireless or mobile regulation and fixed? >> no, there isn't. i think, you know, for good reason, but i think more of a harm monnization razzallization -- rationalization needs to happen. fixed broadband and the need for mobile broadband which is a different service than fixed broadband. for a big trunk of users and especially people at the bottom, there may be substitutes. if i can have both, i will, and there's services of applications and functionality off the two

services, but if there's a short, you know, a short budget, i have 20 make a decision, i choose one or the other, and some choose fixed, others mobile. with the poor people, more choose mobile. >> william lehr is a researcher at the institute of technology. thank you for being on the communicators. >> real pleasure, thank you. >> columnist larry downs is participating at the state of the net conference sponsored by the congressional internet caucus. your more recent book, "the laws of disruption," where did that title come from? >> it came from where technology and business interacted with each other. what i realized was as technology changed or disruptive technology got faster and more disruptive, the ability of businesses and now the ability of consumers to respond as quickly as the technology makes possible was getting further and

further apart, and the gap that was created between the speed of technology and the speed of change was causing all this disruption. >> what's an example of disruptive technology? >> of course, the one here is the internet. that's been the most disruptive technology of the last 50-100 years on par with the steam engine and the early industrial age. it's very -- it's planted many network technologies that people thought were very-well established. >> such as? >> ibm had deck net and other technologies that kept things compartmentalized boxes. it was completely focused on business. here comes the internet not intending to be a commercial technology, let alone a consumer technology, but because of the openness, because it was not owned by anybody, it, you know, became the least common denominator standard, and everything took on the internet as its networking standard, and, of course, as we know, it's turned businesses upside down,

changed the nature of consumers and businesses, changed the nature of citizens and their government. it's remarkably disruptive. >> are apps disruptive? >> yes. i think that as the next wave of the transition. i wrote a book in 1998 releasing the killer app. that was referring to welcomeses, and websites were in early stages then. now, of course, what's causing the disruption of smaller apps running on mobile devices, and the app economy, i think, is going to be the next big wave of how the internet disrupts traditional ways of doing business. >> what are you doing here at the conference? >> many years ago i realized the way in which governments interact, some say interfere, with how disruptive technologies work could have a big impact on how quickly things got aadopted or how well they adapted, and i started advising my clients to

not pay so much attention to their lawyers, but engage themselves in understanding how policy was debated about core technologies that their business relied own and making sure that they understood not just the technologies, but how government may or may not interfere. that was the only way to be effective in making the right laws or not the right laws made in some cases maybe. >> what's your general philosophy with regulation of the internet? >> my general view, and it only applies to what i described to as disruptive technologies because of their very nature, how quickly they spread, the ways in which they take on new uses that nobody expected or intended, it makes them very, very poor fit for government in general. government is deliberative, by design it's slow and methodical. when you're trying to regulate a speedboat, well, you're standing on the dock, the results are almost always bad, and so sort of a general rule, i think,

regulating disruptive technologies generally leads to bad and unintended consequences that nobody wants and nobody would want if they only knew what was going to happen. >> what is c-net? >> c net is cbs interactstive focused on technology and in my case the readership is a technology readership with people interested in the latest and greatest devices. >> you're a clol upist, but what is your day job? >> i'm a consul at that particular time. that's what i've -- consultant, that's what i've always been. it moved from more strategy consulting, helping companies figure out how the technologies are going to change their supply chains or relationships or customers or what the products were. over the last couple years it moved because of the way the world changes, much more into how do policy decisions, court cases, regulations, potential new laws both u.s. and globally,

how do those affect strategy and what to do about them to make sure business can continue and indeed continue to expand regardless of the policy front. >> what technologies are not disruptive? >> well, you know the the basic distinction is very haze city, but, you know, we think of things like oh the the next release of the operating system. the sort of, you know, the upgrade to your existing products from one year's turbo tax to the next is regimely not disruptive. one version of the iphone to the next, largely incremental. these are things that i think consumers, in particular, can adapt to very quickly. you know, when a tablet computer arrives, it's got new uses, we don't know what met fores to apply to it, what to call it. is it a book? a computer? it's like when the car came out, we referred to it as a horseless

carriage because we didn't know what it was. when you have one of those, then it's a disruptive technology. >> in the next x number of months or years, what is the next big disruptive technology? >> well, the mobile revolution will continue and be coupled with this movement from sort of isolated data activities to what's known as the cloud where both the data and processing, from a business and consumer standpoint, more and more of it moves off the individual devices and into this cloud, this network of computers and different service providers and different kinds of companies who will manage it for us, who will provide services with it. those two put together is really creating a remarkable opportunity for businesses to be global overnight, for consumers to connect and do things not only business things, but also social things immediately and on a scale that is unprecedented in

previous history. >> does it matter, larry downes, where the clouds are located? >> it shouldn't. technology doesn't care. the beauty of the interpret is it routes according to traffic. if the traffic is bad in dc, it goes to mulan. the reality is governments have an interest in activities, and they like to decide that, well, if it's passing through here, all of our laws, some of our laws apply to it, and businesses are often surprised to discover that just because the data went through one location, a whole set of laws they know nothing about apply to it. >> so, how far have we moved ahead when it comes to cloud computing? i mean, it's been shifting in that direction. >> yes. >> do you see it going 90%-100% that way, over how far have we gone so far? >> it's hard to say how far we've gone.

for mobile users and increasingly computing is a mobile experience in terms of the device and it's unat the timerred, wireless, wherever we are. for mobile users, it's cloud based. you buy a kindle, some of the books you store locally, but the library is there in the cloud, and that's, you know, makes a lot of sense from business standpoint and the stand point of how much stuff you keep on a device at any given time. this is a good development, and i think because mobile computing is where everything is moving to, the idea of the cloud as the place where the processing and the storage and everything else happens goes with that. i'd say in the next 10 years, of course, local stores never go away, local processing never goes away, but the cloud is clearly the ark architecture that people in the industry believe what will do in the next few years. >> how smart is technology? >> how smart?

technology is only as smart as the engineers who create it, and you know, it doesn't have brains on its own. fortunately, you know, we live in an age of tremendous engineering talent. obviously, in the u.s. and really around the world, and the ability to bring that talent together whenever we need to for short term and long term projects, that's, i think, what's driven the acceleration of disruptive technologies is, you know, the engineers are there. we can bring them to brear on a task wherever we need them too regardless where they are in the physical sense. >> larry downes, does washington understand? >> there's a defect that believes if you don't pay attention to the government, it will go away or not interfere, it just won't be there. i very much face an uphill battle in convincing them

increasely as more and more economic and social activity moves to the cloud, it's natural that governments of all levels are more interested in what goes on there, and so the idea that there's going to be more regulation of all varieties of the technologies that my clients build is inevitable. it's very hard to convince them of that. of course, on the other hand, convincing regulators which i try to do as well that they don't understand technology or the speed in which it's changing and the speed in which it will continue to change, and it's un predictability, that doesn't go down well in washington. >> you recently wrote about the spectrum. >> yes. >> very heavily regulated pete of, well, not technology, but part of the technological world. at what level should it be freed up or unregulated in your view? >> well, there's always been a

fairly good balance between the regulated part of the spectrum and the unregular spectrum. we all agree that the mobile computing environment is growing so quickly and requires more spectrum. spectrum is limited quality. we can be better about sharing it and using it in creative ways through technology, and there's a lot of that, but the fact of the matter is we have a tremendous amount of frequency that we don't know who has the license to it. we have reason to believe it's not used well or at all, and it's imperative that we first and foremost understand where we are now. what is the map of the spectrum allocations, and then quickly afterwards look for ways to get the unvalued spectrum on the market so the best possible

uses, in this case, mobile communicating, can continue to grow at the pace it is because everyone, i think, agrees that we're about to hit a hard stop. it may be in 5-10 years, but without more spectrum for mobile computing, the revolution in progress will not be able to continue. >> people are interested in your columns where do they go? >> www.news.com, and my own website where i write more than they want want to read. www.larry youdownes.com. >> larry, thank you very much. >> thank you. >> up next on c-span 2, a senate hearing looking at online consumer privacy. we're hearing from the civil liberty union and microsoft and harry shearer on new orleans,

and later the muslim brotherhood, a political movement in egypt. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]