Internet, Tech Industry Representatives Seek IoT Spectrum, Limited Regulation
AT&T and Facebook representatives sought limited government involvement in IoT during an event Wednesday. "There is a role of government [regulation], but the pace of change, the pace of technology innovation, is so fast that I think the government is having a difficult time in sorting this out," said Jim Cicconi, AT&T senior executive vice president-external and legislative affairs. "You see two wildly divergent approaches." One is for government agencies to "simply lay back, have a lot of discussions and kind of hope for the best," Cicconi said, while the other is for agencies to "feel compelled to assert themselves in the traditional way" and assert themselves with much more of a "command and control" approach. The first approach risks issues like security, and the other risks "perhaps more" by stifling investment, he said.
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Dipayan Ghosh, Facebook privacy and public policy director, agreed about the potential damage of overregulation, saying government "shouldn't be trying to establish cumbersome regulatory policies that would potentially block certain folks in industry from trying to innovate." Ghosh said overregulation of the IoT could be harmful, but "privacy and security are serious technical challenges [of IoT] that need to be addressed." It's "still too early" to say if rules for regulating IoT are necessary, Ghosh said, also saying it's "just a little bit early" to say whether privacy and security issues of the technology need to be addressed through legislation, industry best practices or other means. "That's still to be determined," he said. "It's very much the government's call."
Cicconi bashed government for "not effectively appropriating" the use of as much spectrum as it should, and urged a quicker process of moving government-controlled spectrum to the private sector. "Government needs to do a much better job of clearing spectrum and selling it," he said. "It still takes far too long to do this. Agencies that control it are extremely reluctant to let go." Cicconi called spectrum sharing "better than nothing" but said it's essentially the government's way of avoiding the "tougher decision" of which agencies really need how much spectrum. "It's very hard politically for some people to make those decision," he said. On AT&T's net neutrality fight with the FCC, Cicconi said courts are going to "throw [the commission's rules] back to the FCC." The net neutrality issue "cries out for a legislative solution," Cicconi said, asking the federal government in general to provide more clarity on its policies and regulatory developments: "There are a lot of areas of uncertainty out there where government policies need clarity."
Thomas Kalil, Office of Science and Technology Policy deputy policy director, touted administration efforts to boost the technological infrastructure of the government and implementation of certain technology policies, saying the president's efforts in that space will outlive his tenure. Kalil said the government needs to continue to get a flow of communications and technology talent from the private sector, an area he said has been improving.