Thank you, Andy and thank you so much to the Media Access Project for having me here.  It is wonderful to see all of you this morning.  I wish I could convey to you what it’s like to work in the White House right now.  There are a lot of people there who are doing the very best job they can. They’re compassionate and intelligent and focused.  I haven’t yet met Bo the dog but I’m sure he’s compassionate, intelligent and focused, and he is certainly photogenic and he got a lot of media coverage, so that’s terrific.

On Day 98 the President gave a very important address, on Monday, before the American Academy of Sciences, and you should have felt the electricity in the room.  I wish you all could have been there, maybe some of you were, but imagine all these scientists who respond to the remark that it would appropriate for facts to drive scientific decisions rather than the other way around.  And they leapt to their feet, well they’re scientists – they didn’t leap to their feet, but they clapped enthusiastically, it was really extraordinarily exciting.  And that address by the President, and I urge you to go read the transcript of those remarks, it was remarkable.  He reminds us that our nation’s purpose is not merely to survive.  That’s not our job.  Even in extraordinarily difficult times we never give in to pessimism.  We are always seeking out new frontiers.  We have great challenges today and enormous opportunities as well.  We have to build up short-term economic prosperity as quickly as we can, finding new jobs for Americans, while laying down the long-term architecture, the infrastructure that will propel us into a prosperous future through economic growth and the development of new opportunities.  This president, the first one with a computer on his desk and a Blackberry, that he fiercely held onto, in his pocket, could give an equally inspiring address about just technology, about the administration’s plan for technology and innovation as a focus for its policy.

Technology and information policy are absolutely critical to our nation’s future and to the long-term architecture that we need to build together.  At the same we are fixing the financial regulatory system, we’re shoring up the banks, we’re finding ways to keep Americans in their houses, we need to be making progress on our long-term innovation agenda – encouraging the development of new ideas that will help Americans find new ways of making a living.  Long-term job growth has to be our top goal, and technology and information policy will help us get there.  I’m here to talk about the first 100 days and the administration’s efforts in technology and information policy over this short period.  And, as Andy made clear, we’ve been quite active.  Let me start with the DTV transition.  In 2005, as you know, the Congress set February 17, 2009 as a hard cut-off date for ending analog transmissions.  That would mean that Americans who didn’t have a digital set or subscribe to cable or satellite would lose the ability to receive broadcasts after that cut-off.  That transition date fell just 28 days after the inauguration.  We found during the transition that there were concrete and dramatic shortfalls in planning for the DTV transition.  As many of you know, Congress had appropriated $1.34 billion dollars for 33.5 million coupons to be given to Americans to help defray the cost of digital-to-analog converters, and as of Sunday, January 4th, the coupon program hit its ceiling and NTIA stopped being able to hand out additional coupons and had to move any Americans calling in onto a waiting list, and would not be able to issue the additional coupons until the ones that were already out there expired.

At that point, NTIA could do no more than put Americans on a waiting list, and that was six weeks before the actual transition was supposed to happen.  Many of our most vulnerable populations were going to be affected by this transition – the elderly, the disabled, minority groups – are overwhelmingly represented in the population of analog television watchers.  We were also very concerned during the transition that coordination between NTIA and FCC had not been well-managed, was not coherent, and planning for consumer-assistance efforts in connection with the transition seemed to be insufficient, based on experience with the test-switch in Wilmington, NC.  There didn’t seem to be enough call-center capacity and outreach efforts were somewhat incoherent, un-coordinated.  At the same time, Congress, and in particular the Senate and House commerce committees, with whom we are working very closely, came to the conclusion that the only rational step to be taken at that point was to briefly delay the DTV transition, while taking significant actions to mitigate the effects of the transition on American households.  So, the final, non-extendable, date of the DTV transition will be June 12th, and Congress has appropriated funds to further support DTV transition efforts.  The waiting list of 4.2 million coupon requests has been cleared, and NTIA and FCC are working closely together to provide better targeted information to consumers, better customer outreach to Americans, and make sure that we’re enhancing call center capacity and on-the-ground outreach efforts, and substantially changing the coupon program so it doesn’t move quite so slowly.

This is not “mission-accomplished.”  I don’t want to over-promise here, but we’re making substantial strides.  The assistance of the cable and broadcast industry has been substantial, and we’re very grateful for their help.  The Consumer’s Union has worked closely with the FCC on creating a new DTV handout that is very useful, and you’ll be seeing it soon, which will simplify the steps consumers need to understand.  Converter box manufacturers have been very helpful.  We have had in effect also the phased transition that many people thought we should have had in the first place, because lots of television stations moved on February 17th, others are moving in between now and June 12th, so we ended up retrofitting ourselves into a phased transition.  I’m cautiously optimistic about the DTV transition at this point.  Our job was to do a better job at communicating to Americans exactly what was going to happen and how they could best prepare.  There is no such thing as a perfect transition, and we know from focus groups that many people will wait until the last minute, or beyond the last minute, to do anything.  We also know that there are serious technical issues that Americans will need to confront.  Signal contour issues, rescanning antenna issues – just having and hooking up a converter box may not solve the whole problem, but NTIA and FCC are doing their best, I believe, to reach people and to assist them and we should be grateful to the leadership of those agencies.  It’s also very exciting that AmeriCorps is working together with the FCC, so AmeriCorps volunteers are lining up to help go into people’s houses and work with them to fix those antenna issues.  This would never have happened without the administration getting involved.  Also, the firefighters are really digging in to the DTV transition and volunteering in numbers, so that’s a big help.  So, of course, an important part of the DTV transition is to reallocate broadcast spectrum for other uses, and the wireless high-speed access and public safety uses of that spectrum are very important to our future.  And, those uses will become reality as a result of this transition.  So, that’s the DTV transition.

Now, broadband.  The President said during the campaign that he wanted to bring broadband to every American.  As a very first step, a down-payment, towards this goal, the American Recovery Act calls for $7.2 billion to be given out in grants and loans, divided between two agencies – the Department of Commerce and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  This will not fill the broadband gap in this country, and so the FCC has been tasked with developing a national broadband plan over the coming year.  We have needed a broadband plan for years, and now we are finally going to get one.  We see the broadband stimulus program as part of a continuum, a seamless single silver thread, a single federal program administered right now by two agencies, USDA and DOC, that will make forward-looking investments, that will provide metrics and proofs of concept that will be useful to the eventual FCC-led plan.  Investments in back-haul networks, particularly rural communities, will likely be particularly helpful, allowing for a variety of service providers to help out in the last mile.  Additionally, Congress has instructed us to focus on community-anchor institutions like schools and hospitals and libraries, other public institutions, that can serve lots of people in communities with access.  Universities might be particularly important nodes for investment because the next great idea is likely to come from a student with a high-speed connection.  Remember where Mozilla and Google came from.

Whatever we do, we need to make investments that will be in the service of principles that are easy to understand and that are relevant to all Americans.  We also need to do some experimenting with this funding because we may find new models that may be very useful to us over the long-term.  We need to make investments that will provide data that will be useful for the FCC in the creation of a national broadband plan.  I’m personally intrigued by Prime Minister Rudd’s announcement in Australia that his government will invest approximately $30 billion dollars in a national open-fiber-to-the-home network.  This will be a wholesale network only, totally separated from the services that are going to be built on top of this infrastructure.  Singapore and the Netherlands and Britain are also looking into wholesale network infrastructure.  These governments understand that a wholesale network can deliver massive social and economic benefits.  In particular, I understand that Singapore has done a study of the externalities that are created through a wholesale network, and they appear to be very large.

Simply put, a digital economy requires fiber, and Australia is making the determination that for that to work it will require a utility approach.  Healthcare, energy, education, media, and public safety concerns will all need to be consulted in Australia to make this basic infrastructure useful for everyone as inexpensive input to their activities.  In other words, Australia thinks that having government invest in fiber will lower the cost of creating new ideas and new ways of making a living for Australians.

Broadband for everyone in America is a big idea.  It’s a technological advance that will be important economic growth.  The linear direct story of economic growth is easy to understand, you have people digging trenches that can have new jobs who didn’t have them before, but the story is not just linear.  Basic communications infrastructure advances can lead to new ideas about how to lower costs and raise profits in all kinds of industries – in other words – increasing returns.  Economic growth in part comes from better recipes, better ideas about how to use finite resources.  New ideas are non-rival, in that anybody can take advantage of them, and new non-rival ideas that we took new goods and services being introduced on a broad scale can trigger increasing returns and new jobs and push economies onward.  In Paul Romer’s words “It is ideas, not objects, that poor countries lack.”

The United States experienced explosive growth in the 19th century because it had abundant resources, a national transportation system, and a large population.  Market size increases incentives for innovation and cheap transportation helps inventors make their new ideas available.  With technological convergence pushing towards standardized machines to produce many kinds of goods and an integrated market and a large group of people to sell to, the United States took the lead over the rest of the world, and held it through much of the 20th century.  Technological change and new ideas helped the United States to surge ahead.  The problem for our country is that it will not be able to stay ahead, in terms of its economic growth rate, by importing ideas from elsewhere.  This means that the United States has to strongly support discovering new ideas within its own borders.

The President’s Monday address underscored this.  As a country, we are in need of meta-ideas about new ideas: ideas about new jobs for Americans, new ways of making a living.  The Monday speech supports investments in scientific infrastructure that are likely to produce new ideas.  It’s quite exciting – the largest single boost to investment in basic research in American history, doubling the budget for key science agencies, a strong focus on energy research, support for graduate education and fellowships, and a commitment to scientific integrity.  It will also be necessary to provide the basic communications infrastructure that will allow these new ideas to be collectively worked on.  Our scientists, researchers, students, and inventive Americans need to be in communication.  The internet provides a particularly fertile ground for new ideas that’s different from broadcast, that’s different from telephony.  It supports the development of persistent, visible groups that can collaborate and are highly likely, given the enormous scale and fast data being transferred across the internet, to trigger the development of unpredictably diverse new ideas.

No matter what study you look at, broadband penetration is lower here than in other developed countries.  The GAO says the median home has just two providers available.  We need to see some experiments with different ways of bringing connectivity to Americans and new ways of stimulating demand as well. The demand side of this equation is extremely important.  Connectivity has always been an issue for online innovation.  As Sir Tim Berners-Lee tells the story of demonstrate the world wide web for the first time in 1991 in Texas, he had to persuade a hotel manager to bring a phone line near the conference room, and then he had to persuade a local university to give him dial-up access to the internet, and then in order to get his modem to work he had to undo it with a screwdriver and use a soldering iron to connect it to the power source that was there.  He would obviously have a much easier time today, but maybe not easy enough.  Jonathan Seff said in MacWorld last week that we should do a better job as a nation of making sure fast, affordable broadband is as ubiquitous and easy-to-obtain as electricity, water, snail mail, or any other utility.  World War II and the launch of Sputnik prompted a new set of principles about the role of the government in support of science, fundamental concepts, and infrastructure.  These principles are potentially as relevant today as they were then.

But let’s see first how the stimulus program pans out.  We need to make investments that are sensible and that are understood, and accountable metrics are extraordinarily important for this program.  And these investments should provide information that will help the FCC with its national broadband plan.  So, that’s broadband.

Finally, another major development in the last couple of weeks was the appointment of Aneesh Chopra as the country’s Chief Technology Officer.  The CTO position is a distinct position from that of the Chief Information Officer, who’s the terrific Vivek Kundra.  Watch what Vivek is up to, a little parenthetical here – data.gov will be coming in the coming months.  It’ll be opening up government data in structured feeds so that anybody can use it, any new business can find a way to access the terabytes of data that the government creates all the time.  Vivek is working very hard on steadily opening up government processes and using innovation more efficiently for all of us – making sure that technology is used effectively by the federal CIO’s as well.  But, that’s Vivek.

This is Aneesh Chopra, who is the CTO, and his responsibility is to develop national strategies for using advanced technologies to transform our economy, much along the lines of what I’ve just been talking about, and our society, such as fostering private sector innovation, lowering the costs of health care, using technology to change the way teachers teach and student learn.  Aneesh has had a very successful run in Virginia as the Secretary of Technology there.  Last year, Virginia was ranked number one in technology management, as a direct reward for Aneesh’s work.  He’s made significant achievements in health care and education.  He got the nation’s first open-source textbook approved.  He initiated competitions for students to create iPhone apps.  He designed a social network for physicians in remote areas.  He is a perfect appointment because he’s very practical and yet very knowledgeable about new technology.  And, he’s going to use the best tools we have to get the job done.  So his appointment and Vivek Kundra’s appointment are also very important developments over these first 100 days.  So, we are privileged to serve President Obama who does, as Andy says, understand the power of technology and understands that it needs to be harnessed in the service of the nation’s goals.  He also understands that advances in science and technology are crucial to our economic future, and that’s the future we have to be focused on.  Thanks again for having me here.