Technological Opportunities, Job Creation, and Economic Growth

Speaking at a New America Foundation event, Lawrence Summers, Director of the National Economic Council, focused on President Barack Obama's move to dramatically increase the amount of federal and commercial spectrum available for smartphones and wireless Internet devices.

Summers put the move into historical perspective:

"The most important innovations are those that create possibilities that could not have previously been imagined, and with them create the industries of the future and millions of new jobs. The steam engine, electricity, the automobile - these were technologies that did not just permit existing products to be produced better or more cheaply, but opened whole new economic vistas. We are in the middle of another one of those revolutions right now. The information technology revolution is redefining infrastructure. For millennia, progress in infrastructure came from the more effective movement of the commerce in goods and services. But in the digital world, we are concerned with the movements of images and ideas, bits rather than mass. We are now in the midst of the third wave of the Internet's development: mobile broadband. And we have only begun to glimpse the benefits of that revolution, exemplified by smartphones, netbooks, and the applications that run on them."

And he identified the four key parts of the President's plan:
1. Identify and plan for the release of 500 MHz of spectrum.
2. Provide new tools and new incentives to free up spectrum.
3. Redeploy the spectrum to high-value uses.
4. Use the auction proceeds to promote public safety and job-creating infrastructure investment.