we can see that the whole world is changing because of the products they make. unlike those old industries, railroads, whatever. we do not to do with the government. obviously, they have department said are involved.

in the case of microsoft, force them to pay a lot of attention. in the ensuing period it, octuple cut their lobbying, even then, it was many years before -- as you point out, they all have the significant offices. in some cases, not only for the purpose of traditional lobbying and so forth, but they have a little tax work going on in the region. >> when it comes to the lobbying in the regulatory agencies in washington and the tech companies, first of all, did the microsoft antitrust suit, was it

just because microsoft got too big? >> he was not just because microsoft got too big. i am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that it is not illegal to be a monopoly. it is just a legal to use your monopoly power in a certain way. that is ancient history. there is an antitrust case involving apple and sun book publishers right now. there is a google anti traced -- antitrust case. these are -- it is not the sheer size of these companies. sometimes it tracks the attention of the government as the way they interact with the economy, the way they interact

with privacy, the way they interact with commerce. in the case of that will, they are very big in a dollars since. they are big on the impact they have on everyone's lives. obviously, that is going to attract the attention of regulators and enforcement agencies in the city. i will say that i have lived in washington for nearly 40 years and i spent 20 years as a washington correspondent and editor in our washington bureau. before turning to technology, my observation is that the government in general was and still is behind in its actual integration and use of tied biology on a day-to-day basis.

i will give you an example. the government is the last -- one of the last major holdout of using the blackberry. the blackberry is an historic and important and story device. he never want to rule out the company -- you never want to rule out that a company will make a comeback. if you have the choice, blackberry is a severely limited device compared to an iphone or in android phone. this is one of the few cities where you can walk around and see large numbers of black berries today. you do not sit in new york, chicago, los angeles, london, latin america. basically, the world has moved on. washington has not. that is a symbol of -- when i used to cover national security in the state department, this

was 25 years ago, the reporters on the secretary of state airplane, including me, had much more advanced laptops than the secretary of states officials or the cia people on the plane or the dod people on the plane. we had the best technology, and our government did not. obviously, things have improved a lot since 25 years ago, but at every stage as technology moves, the government is laggards. i think that affects the understanding of these companies. i am not saying the government should not be regulated. there was a view at one time in silicon valley that they were a mean to regulation. i do not believe that.

i do think that sometimes, the government, congress is understanding or the white house is understanding is not bridge should be. >> why is that? >> i do not know. i think there is a could come in here. -- cocoon here. thinking about the way the average people operate or the government of the world operate. they're getting educated fast in silicon valley. they do everything fast. we do everything slow in washington. you know, there is a cocoon in new york about the financial industry. they do not quite connect with how everyone sees them or interact with them. every town that is an industry town has that. silicon valley's certainly does. the washington can, one of the impacts has been to not allow --

at least the senior people. the junior people here are different. i was recently added a meeting with a company, the whole hierarchy of the company that is not a tech company. it has dealings with tech companies, but it is not a tech company. they are using ipad. they were sitting there with ipad. the ceo, the coo , the cfo, the chief marketing officer, all these people.

they have adopted this quickly. in hollywood, they have adopted it. uc iphone and ipad and sometimes android devices in hands of even the top people. they read their scripps and ipads and they have put away their laptops. not so much here in washington. there is a gap. >> i did bring down my personal devices and you can see there is a blackberry. android, and in ipad. how much of a dinosaur am i? >> the android and the ipad are very modern. i do not know which android phone this is, it is a couple of years old. i would not say a dinosaur at all. i do not know why you still have a blackberry. why do have a blackberry? >> e-mail. >> these and other devices to a great job would work e-mail.

>> when did you give your sup? >> i never had a blackberry. -- when did you give yourself up? >> i never had a blackberry. i newsday palm. it was not about physical keyboards, but the ability to use apps. and to be more productive. there are loads of apps that are productive. the blackberry did not have to many apps. it had a very complex user interface. it was designed as a corporate device. there are loads of concerns, and i do not mean to insult anyone. i could, you could show me videos and games. it is a good e-mail device. it is a good e-mail device for

corporate e-mail or the i.t. department has decided you should use it. >> walt mossberg, we passed some supporters if they had some questions for you. how do you view microsoft's new tablets computer? can they compete and hardware? >> maybe we should explain to people that something historic happen to last week, which is that microsoft announced that it is building its first computer. it happens to be a tablets computer. it will run the new version of windows, which is coming out in the fall. it is a hybrid of the tablets operating system. we do not know whether that will

appeal to consumers. they decided to adopt apple's model. microsoft and apple have been rivals for decades. one of the big differences between them was that microsoft was very firm on the idea of putting aside -- putting aside for a minute the xbox, we will make the operating system and other people make the hardware. apple's philosophy has been, the right way to do this is to the whole thing. the software integrates with the hardware. it is one reason, for instance, i have tested -- i do not know, two dozen or three dozen tablets. not a single one has, then two hours of the battery life of the ipad. it is not because apple has a

secret battery technology. it is partly because they all in the operating system and the on the hardware and they can make the operating system operates in a way under the covers that is friendly to battery life. a company like samsung has to take android and integrated with their hardware. the two things were not made together. to go to the question, microsoft is an historic thing. they have capitulated to the apple model. they're doing it to compete with apple. they tried it once before with the music player, but it was much too late. it never took off. now they are doing best. the answer to whether i think he

can succeed, i have not reviewed yet. i have not lived with the yet. i am a movie reviewer or something, except i've reviewed technology. i have seen i have fooled around with it for 10 or 15 minutes. i know the people that were behind it and i understand the explanation of why they did and how they did it. my judgment is always reserved for when i had a chance to use it. it looks good and we will have to see. one issue is that it depends -- they are initially owning going to sell its in limited outlets. microsoft has about 20 stores. it looks like partly because of the politics of not wanting to be delicacies of not wanting to compete with their own licensees like dell and acer,

they will not distributed as widely as they might. >> elizabeth wasserman is the editor of politico wants to know, will do not track features solve privacy problems? >> laws are needed. luckily, i am an opinion columnist, not a news reporter. i can have -- it is my opinion that we need a serious comprehensive federal level privacy law in the united states. i do not believe that the online advertising industry and other on-line businesses -- it is no

different than other experiences we had over the long history of the united states. i do not mean to sound like i want to go crazy and regulate the internet. on the other hand, i do not believe the internet should exist as a place outside the law. here is an example of one thing that might happen. i know before i say this that the political climate in congress is never this simple. you could have a bill which simply said, we have an economy

and a whole society built on private property with thousands of court cases. can we use your private property to fuel our business, which is doing an alleged six -- doing analytics? peter, can we use it, you can say no. i am being facetious because we are a capitalist society. i work for the wall street journal. why not pay for it? maybe your attitude is, under no circumstances can we use it, maybe your attitude is, i do not care. maybe your attitude is, it is my private property. pay me something.

give me $5 a week or whatever it is. we could have a whole business built up around the use of desperate right now, they simply take it, -- around the use of it. right now, they simply take it. companies that depend on advertising the google and facebook. they take this information and the only thing you are given, supposedly, is targeted as that you should enjoy more than nine targeted adsds i is been on the internet every day since it started. i still do not did ads that are targeted at my interest. i did nothing they have held up their end of the bargain. yes, i think we need a privacy law. >> what does ran, google, apple

know about me? >> google -- i do not know about research and motion, i do not know -- they are not that involved. c-span, if that is a c-span issued phone, your i.t. departmentcertain amount about you because they and rim together control the e-mail system. bibelots a lot about you. if you use them for -- google knows a lot about you. if you use them for research, they know lot about you. i am not saying they use it, that there are some cases would the street mapping. they were collecting stuff out of people's wi-fi networks. they about you. apple knows a lot about you. apple has been -- apple has had

a few slip ups. much to the consternation -- for instance, magazine publishers and others, apple has not been willing to give them even your basic information unless you allow it. that is -- that has annoyed a lot of the magazine publishers. apple is more restricted, but they just ride that they have 400 million customers this credit cards they have. i do not mean that they stole the credit cards, but when you signed up as a customer at itunes, you entered a credit card. we have talked about companies like aol, dell.

is one of the big five going to be a dinosaur? >> it is certainly possible. apple was 90 days from bankruptcy 15 or 16 years ago. 90 days. after being built wunderkind 10 years ago. they are probably the single most influential tech company in the world. they are highly profitable. market capitalization is enormous. google did not exist, you know, 30 years ago. anyone of these companies -- one of the things i love about covering the sector, people do fail and it is not a stigma. if you fail, you can dust

yourself off and come back and tried to get funding and often you can get funding. if you come up with another good idea. there is always a second chance. there are a lot of sectors in our society or failure is a big stigma and tech is not one of them. the answer is coming any of these people can. it is very interesting, microsoft -- you have not heard about microsoft. they have been behind the curve on phone and tablet. they still are. this is going to be a year where there is a lot of microsoft excitement. that is a great strength of the tech sector. companies are up, companies are down, other companies go out of business. it is really the free market and innovation and entrepreneurship at its best. >> walt mossberg, what is a piece of technology that is coming that you are excited

about? >> it is an overused term, but the cloud is an enormous thing. with the cloud means is that beginning to rely more on remote services on servers somewhere out in the world that you get to a relatively light device. may i? in the early 1980's, there were theories and papers written about having something little like this that could never the less to all kinds of amazing things. public comment this could do that because processors have gotten better and batteries have gotten thinner. we have wi-fi and we have cellular data.

there are apps on your better. the local. you could go down mudpacks that store everything on year. -- download apps that start everything on here. a lot of apps , which give you restaurant recommendations, or travel stuff, with thikipedia, those things go out into the cloud. this thing does not have to have a huge hard disk. i think the cloud has issues comment it has in securities, multiple different clouds services.

he will have to figure out what you want to do, but that is an enormous. >> all these devices, they use spectrum. . .

>> it is based on old concepts. there is only so much spectrum. i am not disputing that. the way the government divvied it up stems from radio, stems from a very old thing. the notion that if the spectrum was too close to each other it would interfere. there are just 1 million policies where the fcc has its roots in an era that has no resemblance to an era today. second, spectrum policy is influenced by lobbying. the fcc universe is full of people -- they leave the fcc and become telecommunications lawyers practicing before the fcc. presidents of both parties up. people with -- i am not saying

anything illegal or corrupt, but it is just the truth. is another one of these baubles. there is a telecom bubble around the fcc. he has much more of a tech outlook on the world. he is close to the president personally, which is an advantage for him. he is a very smart guy. we had him at our conference. he gets all of these tech data device issues. the traditional deep rooted telecom interests in this town, he is not their favorite guy. i think spectrum policy is -- need a tremendous overall.

it needs to be focused overwhelmingly on digital, wireless lifestyles that people are adopting, not on old broadcast lifestyles. >> one final question from eliza of politico -- will at&t and verizon's dominance, will that slowdown innovation in the tax base? we will leave it there. >> i think the answer to that is it well could. this is not a particular criticism of those two companies. i believe one of the big game changing differences that was kicked off by the iphone was that it was the first significant found in the united states. there may be some other one i do not know about. it was the first one where the

carrier was at&t -- it was actually cingular that changed its name to at&t around that time -- they did that have anything to say about the phone. the same is true today whether it is verizon, sprint, at&t or any overseas. apple controls that from. it is like a pc or a mac. in's say you have a dell your house and to switch it for an hp. let's say you are using chrome browser but you switched to safari. the company from which you buy your internet connection, whether it is comcast or whoever it is, five rows or whoever in washington, you do not have to let them know anything about that. they are not involved in what computer you have. they did not designed a

computer. you did not buy it from them. they do not get to say what browser is on it. apple's approach with the iphone was much more like the mac or a pc approach than the traditional phone approach which was carriers decided what funds you can use on their network. carriers dictated to the phone makers what it should look like, what the software should be on the phone. carriers had colossal power. at&t -- what we have had is a concentration of wireless carriers. at&t and verizon is roughly the same size, being so much bigger than sprint and t mobil. the thing that i worry the most about when talking about innovation is that at&t and verizon are now -- first of all, they are bringing out a wonderful thing which is called

lte. it is the only real "4g." -- yours cand nor ignore all other 4g's. it is faster than most people's home internet connection. it can be four times as fast as your home internet. they are putting it into these buckets and charging a lot of money if you go over a certain number of gigabytes or megabytes a month. nobody knows how to count megabytes and gigabytes. they are now providing apps and notifications when you get close to your limit. they think that is the solution. companies that are coming out with great new things for any of these devices are assuming and depending upon the fact that you can -- if you choose, you can go and subscribe -- netflix, you

can subscribe to that. you can watch movies all day on here. the new me tiered pricing championed primarily by at&t and verizon i think is going to have a stifling effect on the kinds of things you can do on these devices and through the cloud and over the network. i worry about that. i imagine one response might be that these devices -- technologies are invented that are much more efficient in the use of this. i do not know. >> co executive editor at the washington journal. thank you for being on "the communicators." hos[captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2012] [captioning performed by national captioning institute]

>> on news makers, lee saunders from the american federation of state county and municipal employees. sunday at 10:00 and 6:00 eastern. >> newark, new jersey, mayor cory booker was the commencement speaker at stanford university in june. he addressed the crowd in the stadium where he played varsity football, telling them about civil rights, his career, and change. the stanford university president introduce the mayor this is 50 minutes. >> it now gives me great pleasure to introduce the commencement speaker, cory booker, the mayor of newark, new

jersey. [applause] negligent the energetic, ranked among the top 10 for the 2010 world mayor prize, a former rhodes scholar with clintonian charisma, fearless, determined, committed. that's how the press has described cory booker and he is all of that. but that leaves out the two most important things. cory is a two-degree stanford alumnus and a former member of the stanford cardinal football team that held the axe for four years. [applause] born in washington, d.c., he grew up in a predom inately white suburb of new jersey. his parents were among the first black execute ivessatd i.b.m. they instilled a sen