PolicyBlog

In “Why Doesn’t Washington Understand the Internet?” (Washington Post, Sunday, January 22, 2012), Rebecca MacKinnon documents how often legislation fails to effectively address problems involving or supposedly caused by the Internet and how often Congress considers or enacts policy solutions that are rapidly outmoded by the continuing innovation that is at the heart of the Internet’s success. The question she asks in her piece is a fair one - but it is also fair to note, as even many who helped... Read More

This was first posted today at Verizon’s At Home blog, where I’ve also placed posts about potential, delivery, and innovation – each related to what I’m seeing on-the-ground from the Consumer Electronics Show this week. Here at CES, it’s a mad house.  I walked the floor Wednesday with thousands of my closest friends, looking for “the next big thing.”I found something better.Thousands of gadgets, hundreds of e-tools, and scores and sores of connected devices.  With some pride I noted how much of... Read More

Verizon’s Summer internship program gets an added boost of visibility, courtesy of the US Department  of Labor.  I posted this on our corporate responsibility blog last night detailing this new push.  While it’s bitter cold outside, Verizon is already looking to summer, specifically summer jobs. Today I participated in the “Summer Jobs +” event at the White House to represent Verizon’s internship program for the summer of 2012. This event was hosted by Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis and... Read More

An article by Joshua Topolsky in the Washington Post (“Software — Not Hardware — Is the Star of the Show”) raises some interesting points about the intersection of devices and software.   My sense he is both right and wrong – and he misses a key part in all of this - the networks.   It clearly is true that hardware is less center stage than it used to be but I think this more about the “old” hardware meaning desk top PCs and even increasingly lap tops.   Those well-established devices are far... Read More

I don’t know who said, “It can be dangerous to make predictions . . . especially about the future,” but I suspect that if I did a search I’d find it was Yogi Berra.  Making predictions aren't always what they are cracked up to be, in part because too often they involve simply identifying technologies or uses that are growing today and “predicting” that they will grow larger in the future. I even tried my hand at this earlier this year when I offered some prognostications about future technology... Read More

The following is a guest column I wrote with fellow former Member of Congress Dave McCurdy (D-OK) which ran in the Des Moines Register on 11/12/11.Our rapidly growing national debt has put our country at risk. We used to say that our failure as a nation to make the hard financial decisions would impact the prosperity and wellbeing of our children and grandchildren.Now the future is here. It’s no longer about just our descendants. All of us are likely to soon face the consequences of inaction.If... Read More

I was really wowed at the FCC on Friday.  The Chairman and Commissioner Copps recognized several companies for their cool, innovative products and services that help make communications more accessible to people with disabilities.   Winners included CTIA for their recently launched accesswireless.org website; Apple for their iPhone 4 and 4S; and Universal Subtitles, whose product allows anyone to simply add captioning to any video they post on the Internet, to name just a few.   And Verizon was... Read More

Monday of this week was the 150th anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental telegraph.  It is hard now to understand how significant this event was.  Until the telegraph came in to being, it was impossible for messages to be relayed to people who were long distances apart any faster than the speed of a horse.  Yes, there were earlier devices to transmit communications over long distances that allowed messages to be sent through the air via visible signs such as flags, fire pots or... Read More

This weekend on the Op-ed pages of The New York Times, Verizon’s CEO Lowell McAdam outlined the tremendous benefit of, and pressing need for, making more wireless spectrum available.  See the link or read below.  ===================================================================Running Out of BandwidthBy LOWELL C. McADAMPublished: October 21, 2011 AT a time of slow economic growth and declining competitiveness, wireless technology remains a shining example of innovation. In the last 10 years,... Read More