different paths this no doubt how your education will play a in a central role in all four futures. >> it manifests itself in different forms. >> as well as high school students and families around the nation. >> bye undertaking this project not the federal government of america to provide us with a free ride. >> it's not their job to provide as a free college education or a set price limitations on universities. >> is to provide the resources necessary to have access to a college education. >> this allows us the and valuable opportunity to be whatever we aspire to be. >> or in other words, to realize the american dream. ..

>> tonight "the communicators" with a aneesh chopra, the chief technology officer of the united states on the proposed at&t and t-mobile deal. >> this week on "the communicators," our guest is aneesh chopra, the chief technology officer of the united states.

>> host: aneesh chopra chief technology officer of the united states him if you would start by giving us the parameters of your job with the goals are in this position, who you report to etc.? >> guest: i serve as an assistant to the president and what that means is that report directly to him in my capacity as chief technology officer. i also hold a senate confirmed position which is the associate director for technology in the white house office of science and technology policy where i work with dr. john holdren, the president adviser. the job of the assistant to the president and cto was created by our president because he felt too often our policy discussions whether he and health care, energy and education, fail to capture the full potential of technology data and elevation and so he challenged me to complement the traditional technology portfolios that would have been and ellis tp but to think about how those capabilities could leverage

these other priorities of his and with particular emphasis on the spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation as a means to achieve these larger policy objectives. so that is the bulk of it. it has been to advise the president to ensure that any piece of paper that comes before him is properly vetted to see where their opportunities to engage in interagency collaboration. >> host: let's start with one technology on the front burner right now. that is the potential transaction of at&t buying t-mobile. how does that lend itself to technical innovation? >> guest: well, difficult to comment on a specific merger. as you know i would love to go deep on the issue but the problem is it is an issue that is in front of us from a decision-making standpoint. their equities at the justice department and that the fcc so i'm not in a position to comment specifically about the at&t t-mobile merger by more than excited to talk about the possibilities for wireless writ

large and i would be delighted to meet him that because the president included that is a major thrust of our activities in the wireless initiative that he ruled out in february. >> host: we will get into those but we are joined by cecelia kang of the "washington post" as well. >> guest: thanks for joining us mr. cto. we did have an event this week, today on spectrum and this is related to some of the innovation and goals you have talked about and also related to the merger as peter brought up. in that, one of the promises that at&t has put forward is to bring out wireless connection broadband connections wirelessly to 95% of the country, so in fact they could themselves fulfill in many ways the goal that you set out, you at the white house this set out and the president on blanketing the country, 90% of the country. >> guest: between 95 and 98%, yes of course, still 10 million americans with but your point is well taken.

in fact the fcc national broadband plan has said that today's 3g coverage is largely in pieces and parts covering 90% of the population. it is our hope to not only see that 3g connectivity upgraded to 4g which many of the carrierscome in fact all of them have committed to doing, that we also would like to extend those capabilities to those harder to reach communities but it is not just about the extension of coverage although that is an important part of the presidents agenda. is also ensuring that the united states economy will benefit as we progress through the wireless innovation change, the two 5g and beyond that we have got the right innovation investments taking place today to prepare for the future. >> guest: well one of the things that is part of his goal is to create jobs right away as part of of this innovation economy. one thing that the ceo of at&t said recently in an article was that he does does see

duplicative jobs with the merger, so that is basically saying straightforward that there will be some sort of overlap in jobs and that could lead to layoffs. is that a concern when you look at a merger like this? it is hard to even talk about special policy or any of these telecom things without talking about the merger in and that way. >> guest: but you take a little bit of a step back. the company referenced at&t actually commented publicly. it was actually the tax acceleration provisions the administration had rolled out in and the president rolled out last year and encourage them to frontload some of their lte investments. in fact terms like at&t have said we are taking advantage of these provisions so we can actually buffer capital. that means more jobs in the shorter term which is exactly what the tax policy indicated so beginning by saying today on the ground as her private sectors investing in the up grades to their wireless infrastructure, they are already taking advantage of policy incentives to encourage more jobs now.

but the wireless story is really far beyond just the specifics of the jobs of the carriers. i think it would be a misunderstanding for the audience to presume that jobs unleashing the power of mobile broadband are only that in the trenches if you will, digging out and building up networks. overwhelmingly, and again economist this morning couldn't quite put an upper bound on the number but it has been estimated to be over 100 alien dollars in economic value if we proceed with the president's entire wireless initiative, specially as you look into the out-years because all the companies that are taking advantage of that wireless infrastructure to build out their own products and services. so the job story on wireless is frankly a bigger one for the impact on the economy writ large as opposed to the microeconomic question of whether or not a given set of carriers built out. >> host: aneesh chopra given that you talk about how the

carriers and the private corporations are building out already, what is the purpose of having a public governmental role in broadband? >> guest: oh, let me take a step back and just sort of outline the president strategy for american innovation. the strategy he unveiled for the first time at september 2000 mind to articulate the government's role in this entire ecosystem and it is relevant to the question you just post. so the president basically believes that the foundational principle of our innovation strategies that we invest in the building blocks of innovation and we have identified those building blocks, infrastructure and traditionally had an scene in the roads, railways and runways discussion. with the president is now incorporating our digital infrastructure is part of that definition. he also talked about human capital, the individuals in pursuing degrees in technology and mathematics would have reference importance of basic

research and development. that which our federal labs and our nation's leading universities have been doing at a german this clip plus the private sector's investments in r&d that have been encouraged by areas of the the r&d investment tax credits. so this building block of innovation the president has said is very much aligned with the role of government and the key question of course is how. one of the key principles of the wireless initiative is the how for wireless is entirely built on the private sector. so the whole initiative we have unveiled has been about incentives, encouragement, policy levers that allow the private sector to expand its capabilities to more americans than to ensure that we are prepared to lead the world in wireless innovation in the years to come. >> host: briefly before a close up the story of the the presidents innovation strategy in addition to our investment category, he does believe that we should create the right market conditions to support private sector entrepreneurship and innovation, market raised

innovation and so for that we have encouraged a number of initiatives namely around the president startup america program to encourage more entrepreneurs in the country and hopefully we will get into that discussion but the president did say there are a few issues in our economy where we need an all hands on deck approach and he has outlined a number of those and you have heard him talk about this most recently, unleashing a clean energy economy, driving a health care system that improves quality and lowers costs, ensuring that we have an educational system that delivers leapfrog for breakthroughs if you will to close the achievement gap and frankly to have the president's goal of higher educated population to achieve our college attainment schools that he said by the year 2020. and i'm going to happily walk you through line by line as to the wireless issue specifically that our basic premise is private investment, public policy actions that will spur more of it in a way that delivers these objectives.

>> guest: , so before the private sector even gets their hands on the spectrum, there are a lot of things in need to be done for this strategy in this plan so there are a lot of cars in the train, that's right. went feasibly when you look for, what is the timeline for the spectrum to section to get in the hands of the private sector and this is assuming that everything works, that you get broadcasters to really push the spectrum, that you get the legislation you need in congress, that you get the ftc dropped the rules, they get the repackaging. you see there a lot of cards in this process. >> guest: but not all subsequent show. they could work in parallel. guest: they could work in parallel, right. if i were a metro cellular, pcs or one of these carriers when can i expect to see the spectrum at auction for me to get my money lined up and ready to bid? >> guest: well, let's go through the steps of what we have called for so the president unveiled the senate and tuples for a wireless initiative that

is anchored on a very important legislative requirements, and that is to allow for the fcc to conduct voluntary incentive auctions. it is a policy tool that we think is very much in the spirit of current policy which is to allow the fcc to auction spectrum but at some very important components to these 100 plus economists mission critical in achieving the real economic and effects of wireless. and so it soot search for the proposition that we need a bill from our congress, the president will sign this year, that will about the fcc to have a set of auction authorities. there are also, we believe, critical investments to be made in combination with the incentive auction authority. we believe it is critical to invest in what we think has been a ten-year promise in the making to build out a nationwide public safety broadband network. as you all recall in the wake of the tragedy of 9/11 we identified the fact that our

communications systems are not up to speed when it comes to what is in the hands of our first responders. i avicenna cop car in new york city, even this past year, and the cop car had no digital communications in the actual vehicle. is when you pull over vehicle how do you actually run the plates? is it a cb? i radio in the plate numbers and wait for the operator to respond that are going today's real-time mobile always on connections in our personal lives to think that our first responders don't have access to, not even better, just the same tools that we had in our personal lives the president says no, that is not happening on our watch. we are going to ensure that our families in this country are safe and are secure because their first responders are equipped with the very best that is available to them tipper -- to date is not there. it allocated $10.7 billion out

of the incentive auction proceeds to build out that public safety broadband network and their components and there that are worth talking about. we also believe it is absolutely critical that we extend this 90% goal. the president just seized this third wave of economic growth on the internet, namely the dial-up early broadband era now we get into mobile broadband era that this absolutely is an economic equity question that is all americans, technical and feasible reasons 90% to target access to this capability and 10 million more americans should have that than have it today. and then -- or have had in the past based on projections and in third and perhaps the one that brings me the most excitement from the perspective of my role as chief technology officer, president allocated $3 billion out of the wireless proceeds, auction proceeds for an innovation fund specifically so we could ensure that the u.s.

economy, our nation's best and brightest scientists, technologists and the universities, arts overlaps and are rented sector colleagues who have been repeatedly telling us that they are increasingly shifting dollars away from a sick r&d at what you would call the metal of our wireless networks up and duties more high-margin services, these areas you might call the iphone explosion. everybody has their version. that this is an important part of our story and that the president believes you have got to get the right engine of innovation flowing so that as we protect out five years and beyond, it is the american economy that will produce the products, the services, the infrastructure that would export to the world what we think is that next wave of economic growth. >> host: visa c-span's "communicators" program. our guest this week is the last chief technology officer, aneesh chopra. joining us is cecelia kang of

the "washington post." she is a technology reporter for that newspaper. very quickly, we referred obliquely to this meeting that happen in the white house this week. what was this meeting? guest: earlier today a group of economists from all ends of the political spectrum if i may use the term, those that served in the bush of administration, in the clinton administration, those that are in all walks of life if you will in terms of their political leanings, came together and wrote a shared letter calling on congress to promote this notion of voluntary incentive options to ensure that policy lever is in place because fundamentally, our economy is a market-based economy where you have assets that trade to their highest and best use. what these economists that and of course i'm not trained as an economist at what these economists basically said is that by moving toward the voluntary incentive auction authority there will be a market mechanism that would allow whether or not the owners of spectrum or i should say those

that utilizing spectrum today would see value in can and should bidding that the drum to be available for those that believe there is a better, higher economic purpose. >> guest: the most vocal proponent of auctions, a company that really wanted to buy it spectrum was t-mobile. at t-mobile may now be sort of swallowed up into the at&t universe. do you think, related to the spectrum strategy, there is a concern? analysts and industry experts say you are not going to have as many people bidding on the spectrum. you may not make that $27.8 billion you want to feed into those different opponents components you just displayed out, the r&d, the public safety and all that stuff. so how does the consolidation of this industry affect the success or projects the success of your whole strategy? guest: again it is difficult to comment about a pending merger about its implications but let me make a broad observation. irrespective of the market

landscape, the authority to conduct incentive auctions is a mission critical step on the public policy standpoint. there will be circumstances in each direction along the way, some that would argue increases the values of spectrum and others that would argue potentially might decrease the value the spectrum. the beauty of having the auctions authority is nothing defined success more than a mechanism whereby an owner or a utilizer of an asset expects a price and a buyer of an asset offers a value. you know, the games of trade as the economist book of today is the ultimate arbiter of whether or not there is enough demand in the market. if there is insufficient revenue, to meet the needs of the owners or the lasers of spectrum today, then the auction won't move forward. the policy remains solid. that is that the incentive auctions authority gives the fcc the tools to conduct that auction. i happen to have high confidence

that economic principles will hold and that the absolute reality is spectrum is a scarce resource. we have recently come to understand just the sheer magnitude of the use in our personal lives. just to give you some statistics that have been coming out recently, the average smartphone uses 25 times as much data as a regular voice cell phone, and our tablets that all of us are buying at record clips that have made my families like a little bit more exciting, 100 times the usage of data. so we do not know what the ultimate demand will be projecting out five or 10 years but unless you have the goals -- tools he cannot actually realize whatever the circumstances may be. >> guest: do you think there is enough competition in the wireless industry? >> guest: thankfully i'm not the one to render that judgment. >> guest: do you as the cto as

the country have a sense of that? >> guest: the reason i say that is the fcc's technical responsibility to render such judgment can report the issue every year. >> guest: how about the justice department? >> guest: in this context the justice department activities are really not as the review of the white house. these are actions that are effectively independent as they should be. so for purposes of evaluating given transaction, it is really not the process or appropriate for the white house to engage. this is the nature of the circumstances. but the bigger question, the bigger question is whether or not there are emerging technologies that are changing the mechanisms by which one reads the value of wireless technology. we haven't even begun in this conversation discussing the power of shared spectrum and dynamic spectrum allocations in the market makers that would allow those that are rights holders to spectrum to essentially allow secondary

users to participate in that market and there's an economic transition to be had. so it is an important question of course to say what are the carriers doing? what is happening in the economy? but my job for the president is to say are we properly deploying the right r&d investments, ensuring that we have got the entrepreneurial engines focused on this? are the policies in place so that we can ensure leadership on this issue for years to come and i'd like to say on that front. >> guest: speaking of policy what would you say about this idea that -- actually i should ask you directly, why is spectrum public safety community and that? there is some that would say that actually led t-mobile to decide that they could not get spectrum they wanted to more quickly deploy and to answer my first question when spectrum would be available. before i get to that, do you think that t-mobile was affected by that decision and that they needed and they wanted that d

block spectrum that -- i'm getting really in the weeds here but that 10 megahertz will be according to your plan allocated to public safety and some would say that effectively, that decision effectively forced the company to decide that it didn't have many other options but to consolidate with at&t. >> guest: the good news is i'm not the chief strategy officer for t-mobile so it is hard to get into their brains to understand exactly what their calculus was or at&t's or sprint. i do very specific charge by the president. does our policy today to ensure that our first responders have access to the same technologies that you and i do as individuals so that they can perform their mission objectives to the fullest extent possible. and as we evaluate a very exhaustive exercise in the private sector, our first responders, academic leaders, we hope public forums, roundtables. i was personally gauge on this issue because the president

asked me to do so. the vice president is very strong team have been a leader on these issues for years, the national economic council. we all partnered up to understand objectively what are the needs of our public sector community, will they be met under policy constraints and has that led us to make the decision that for this capability to get into the hands of first responders in the technical means by which they need them it was important for us to establish their own public safety network and give them the best and brightest. >> host: aneesh chopra where the broadcasters that your specter meeting of the white house? >> guest: and let me be careful, and today's meeting? they might've been in the audience. the economist and spoke warrant representing any given broadcasters but i would tell you i've spoken to a number of them and there is are some very thoughtful conversations to be had and that are all going to be built into the congressional process. and that is questions about love, what is volunteering mean? will i have the ability to still

broadcast my channels that participate in this auction in some form or fashion? will there be opportunities for me to make sure that if in fact i don't want to participate in this that they were not going to force me down into the lower vhs frequencies that will be less than ideal for me? those are thoughtful conversations and those are conversations that absolutely will take lace as you set the rules on their road to mail. today's economic value, not the owners of the spectrum or the holders of the spectrum. there is no reason why a judgment by a broadcaster to say i see a vision of mobile broadcasting that is in my future that delivers economic value is an excess of what i could have otherwise gotten from auction. that is the power of a voluntary incentive option. >> host: should there be an inventory of spectrum? >> guest: well certainly there a lot of technical questions about what is currently in use and what is not. might look opus on the question is really to understand how does one engage in dynamic spectrum

sharing so that if you look at the white spaces effectively when of key questions is there a database that one can use to ensure when you are going into otherwise white spaces you are not interfering? those are technical components that you would want to have as part of a larger innovation agenda that takes full advantage of spectrum that may be in this, what the national academy sort of sees -- and they had a wonderful line. they said this on your spectrum policy focused on lightness, not darkness. today's policies darkness, clear the band, tempe now the highways yours. go run and build economic growth in the future. their argument in the academy's report on wireless was look, there's a lot of noise. you have have to start engineering wireless products and services that can manage round the noise. incensed that is a question of you know, the notion of a noun, is there a cole inventoried versus the verb which is how does one understand the situational awareness in order to level judgments about

property rights and the ability to communicate? i mourn for sizing the verb than i am any particular notion of a noun. >> guest: let's switch gears to privacy. the white house for the first time said that it endorses the idea of a law, if for some law for privacy on the internet. do you support the recommendation by the federal trade commission to create a mandate for a do not track sort of technology that would stop web sites from following users on the web comic browser technology? do you support this idea do not track? do we have not taken a formal position on do not track at this time. the president called for and we have had an interview agency review in this is one of the areas that i have had reticular leadership and emphasis on, the commerce department has been phenomenal in developing a green paper that was published maybe three or four months back at this point and that is the basis upon which larry strickling deliver the testimony that he did just a couple of weeks back where we ask rest our formal commitment to basic privacy

protections and we thought that fits the fair information practice dinner should be the base and we also acknowledge that the fcc should have enforcement and already on that day's privacy provision, and that there should be enforceable codes of conduct emphasizing the role of voluntary cooperation. wide-awake you'd be this long convoluted story? it is conceivable that the browsers, the internet economy more generally, key stakeholders on their own and a voluntary fashion come together to put together the functional equivalent of a do not program and that may come in as a voluntary industry led program that they could be enforceable by the ftc as a commitment they have made to improve privacy. the reason i see the slight distinction here is that our framework stop short of any particular mandates akin to do not and much more about a

framework for how policy, privacy policy should come moving forward and it emphasized most certainly the notion of voluntary enforceable codes of conduct. >> guest: which is what the industry wants. they want sort of a war of a self regulatory voluntary thing. towns actually quite different from what the ftc is wanting. >> guest: i don't know if it is particularly different or not. the question ultimately is again, separate the noun from of her. what is the objective? if the objective is to strengthen the privacy posture of z and people in a digital age, think we are is explicitly clear as possible about our intentions. the policy mechanisms we have outlined thus far, we haven't really rendered a final judgment on what the final legislation should be but as a model and framework we have said privacy protections. we have said insuring that there is enforcement authority over the ftc to look into this, commerce and its capacity has a privacy office they can engage

on these issues in a bid of a more engaging and collaborative way and it is about voluntary codes of conduct. now we have had some experience outside of privacy with this notion of industry consensus standards activities and i think very positively on health care i.t.. in less than one year, we have seen the private sector step up to the plate and rita technical standards for safe and secure e-mail. did you know that you today can't have your doctor e-mail your medical record to a specialist? in the 21st century economy, you can't have your medical record e-mailed to yourself if his e-mail is inherently insecure and people are concerned about the implications were health insurance -- i'm sorry, hip of the health insurance privacy acts. the industry after hearing the challenge, stepped up to the plate and in 90 days agreed to a technical amendment to how e-mail is operated. basically authenticating u.s. the sender and the