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

william lehr of massachusetts institute of technology where he is a researcher on the communications futures program. first of all, dr. lehr, what is the communications futures program? >> >> guest: communications futures 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. so we work together, several schools at mit, with industry partners both internationally and domestically to look at various issues confronting the internet. and the idea is to try and think about technologically aware policy and business strategy and business strategy aware technology and sort of try and bridge that gap. >> host: what are you thinking about most these days? >> guest: well, with the internet there's a lot of things to think about. we personally, i spend a lot of time thinking about wireless issues, and i come out of a regulatory economics research background, and so i'm especially interested in all the sort of nontechnical side of, like, policy and business stra

. >> william lehr is a researcher at the massachusetts institute of technology. thank you for being on the program. author and columnist larry downs is also participating in the the state of the net conference. in your most recent book, "the laws of disruption," where did that title come from? >> it came from work i did several years ago looking at how technology and business interact. one thing i realized was that the technological change, or what we sometimes call disruptive technology, got faster and more destructive. the ability of businesses to respond as quickly as possible and the ability of technology to be disruptive and was getting further and further apart. >> what is an example of destructive technology? >> the one we're all talking about here, the internet. it is the most destructive technology of the last 50-100 -- disruptive technology of the last 50-100 years. it has supplanted many other technologies that many people thought were well established. there were proprietary networking technologies in compartmentalized, rigid boxes, completely focused