Smart Policies to Upgrade the Internet

Policy recommendations to support the IP Transition:

• Government leaders need to speed up lengthy rulemaking procedures.
• Regulators need to be open to new business models and applications with the potential to improve consumer communications and commerce.
• During the IP Transition, a critical priority is to protect vulnerable populations. To ensure the IP Transition has a soft landing, the elderly, disabled, and those residing in rural areas must be provided the same or better service than they are currently receiving.
• Increase the number of experiments to gauge the impact of these transitions, to assess costs and benefits. Using the information from these trials to enact data-driven regulation. Regulations can use data to match the needs and responsibilities of the public sector with the innovation capacity of the private sector.
• With the insatiable demand for larger amounts and faster content delivery, we need to build a next generation digital infrastructure. This new infrastructure should support innovation in commerce, health care, education, transportation, and energy.

Barriers to Innovation:

• Reskilling current workers for new technologies is critical for future success. Current methods include partnering with local universities and using MOOCs to reskill workers for new technologies, but transforming a mathematics expert into a big data scientist is a difficult and timely process.
• The telecommunications industry needs more spectrum.
• Adaptation is vital to the ever evolving telecom industry. Some television networks have successfully transformed from a content creator to a content distributor.
• There is tremendous competition to hire the qualified tech engineers. The STEM pipeline must be improved.