C-PET

C-PET: Asking Tomorrow's Questions

 

On the Internet of Things 

 

Dear C-PET


 


 

On the Internet of Things: Three Keys

 

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

 

We have just completed the Global Summit on the Internet of Things in which C-PET has served as knowledge partner and several of our network been much engaged. I moderated the session on Smart Cities, hosted a fireside chat with Eric Openshaw of Deloitte, and was invited by organizers Forum Global to offer concluding remarks.

 

Here is a summary of my remarks, drawn from the major themes of the 3-day Summit.

  1. FTC Chair Edith Ramirez opened the Summit by declaring that we are now in the "Era of the Internet of Things." Yet other speakers used very different terms to set out our current situation. Memorable was the reference to the early days of the auto; and another similar parallel, with the early days of the un-networked PC. It seems to me that these are both accurate statements of our current situation, and that it is when we remember them both and hold them together that we shall grasp the extraordinary nature of the contemporary IoT. After years of prognostication and hope, we have arrived. And yet the point at which we have arrived is merely that of the beginning of an increasingly rapid and dramatically transformative exponential movement.

  2. IoT is the ultimate ecosystem technology. That is, while there are many IoT applications unrelated to others, the vast value of the IoT will be realized only in a context coterminous with the economy and, crucially, the social order - as, to quote Chair Ramirez again, "our virtual and physical worlds merge." The IoT beckons to button the old economy to the new economy, and the transformative possibilities of that "merger" are hard for us even to imagine. Our program in this Summit has illustrated something of the range of possibilities involved. But we have only begun.

  3. Picking up my conversation with Eric Openshaw - we shall indeed need highly imaginative thinking to begin to realize the enormous value that we all sense lies within the IoT. I have been highly critical of the projections that some companies and analysts have offered - year X, Y devices, Z value - when we scarcely know where this will lead us from one year to the next. We need to remember the example of Search, as a word that meant looking for something and suddenly became the driver of a big slice of the global economy. We do not yet know the business models that will enable the IoT to power trillions of dollars of value, and change our lives probably much more dramatically than the internet and mobile have so far. It will likely be third party developers who frame the innovative possibilities, which is one reason why standards are so crucial to drawing out the value of this transformative technology.


     

    The motto of the National Press Club, where the Summit was convened, is Where News Happens. News was happening in these panels as the IoT was articulated.



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Think tanks - non-profit policy institutes - are funded in various ways.

 

In Washington, we know all about following the money! Partisan or ideological organizations get partisan, political funding. Non-partisan set-ups are often funded by corporate donors, and tend to come up with the kind of conclusions those corporations favor. Some other groups are not actually independent, but function as departments of universities.

 

Since it was established in 2007, C-PET has resisted all three of these models. We are carefully non-partisan, and our board members, advisers and fellows are spread across the party/ideology spectrum. We have declined to follow the largely corporate-funded route in order to maintain our impartiality - though we are happy to receive corporate funding that isn't tied to outcomes (and recognize that groups thus funded can do good work). So, we are grateful to the Microsoft Institute for helping fund our recent conference on innovating government. We have also retained our independence from potential university hosts. In fact, prior to founding C-PET I myself directed two centers on technology and policy at the Illinois Institute of Technology, which hosted a series of policy events in DC, so we have nothing against academe. But we have sought to maintain C-PET's independence and freedom of action.

 

Of course, this comes at a cost. So we find ourselves appealing to people like you for contributions. If you appreciate our output of commentaries, events, teleconferences, and other initiatives, we hope you will help (see below for the summary of our most recent event, on the future of cybersecurity). There's a Paypal button at the top of the C-PET website (or you can send a check to the address below). Small and large gifts are welcome, and we are happy to discuss corporate sponsorships also. If you work with a foundation and some aspect of our work might be a fit, please let us know. We would like not just to continue C-PET but to scale it, so our message can be amplified.

 

And at heart, what is our message? There are three aspects:

  •  the questions raised by emerging technologies are much more important than most in the policy community realize;
  • policy issues are much more important than most in the technology community realize;
  • and engagement with the long term is crucial for current decision-making.

We are committed to furthering this discussion because we consider it vital to American prosperity and security, the good of the global order, and the integration of values and dramatic shifts that have only just begun. 

 

If you agree and these issues matter to you, we look to you to help fund us.

 

 

Best,

 

Nigel


 

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On Cybersecurity: the C-PET Roundtable


 

Nigel M. de S. Cameron


 

Today's Roundtable assembled experts and leaders for a stimulating morning's engagement. The group included representation from the policy, corporate, and technical worlds, and also diplomats from half-a-dozen missions. The subject was Cybersecurity in 2020: The Emerging Agenda. That is, a medium-term perspective - one that can be as challenging as it is crucial to achieve in a Washington focused on short-term politics.


 

The panel consisted of Dan Caprio, Senior Strategic Advisor at McKenna Long & Aldridge, who advises clients on a range of technology issues and has worked in government, including as Chief Privacy Office in the Dept of Commerce;  Kristin Lovejoy, General Manager of the IBM Security Services Division, charged with development and delivery of security services to IBM clients worldwide, and whose career began as an "ethical hacker" with an intelligence agency; Michael Nelson, who currently teaches in Georgetown's program on cyber policy and the future of the Internet and whose background includes the White House and FCC.


 

This listing does not purport to summarize the full proceedings, but shares some highlights and creative reflections.

  • The economic incentive for criminal hackers needs to be progressively reduced. We have had good success in attacking spamming in this way. One international representative shared that in his country young people see hacking as a lucrative career opportunity.
  • Part of the solution lies in the development of appropriate criminal sanctions that apply in every nation.
  • The centrality of organizational maturity. That is, cybersecurity does not exist in a vacuum or as an occasional crisis situation. It is simply one key aspect of "security" in general, and mature organizations will take account of the centrality of secure systems as part of a culture that handles issues of risk. It was noted that insurers and reinsurers are now alert to this set of questions; the economic arguments are increasingly clear. SMEs as well as large companies need to take routine security seriously - of which https is one example; and chip and pin will help.
  • We need global collaboration/standards. It was noted that the ITU is a source of controversy, as countries with an interest in limiting freedom of expression have influence in this forum.
  • Innovation will be central to the development of effective measures. There need to be encouragements to the innovation community to focus here. The government can take many steps - and has taken some - but it will not "solve" these problems; but it can use policy to set a framework in which they can be better addressed.
  • Collaboration between companies raises anti-trust issues, though an example was shared in which they were waived by the administration in the interests of effective cyber defense. Multistakeholder collaboration will continue to be a key factor.
  • The cloud. Point was made that its centralization of data will aid security.

It was also noted that the global situation has shifted, limiting the role of the nation state and granting non-state actors greater opportunity to exercise asymmetric influence. This raises the stakes, and creates a situation in which whether states, criminals, or terrorists are responsible - or some collaboration between them - can be unclear. 


 

These issues are unlikely to be "resolved," though there was some optimism expressed that by resolute effort they will be able to be contained as technology evolves.


 

Your comments will be appreciated and shared.


 


 


 


 

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INTERNS


 

 

C-PET has one or two openings for interns, both for the spring semester and summer 2015. Please reply to this email with Interns in the subject-line for more details. C-PET interns are not remunerated and need not be resident in the DC area. Feel free to pass on this invitation; we have had some excellent interns over the years, often by recommendation from faculty, family and friends.


 

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies

840 1st St NE, 3rd Floor,

Washington, DC 20002

  

  

  

 

  

  

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FROM RECENT NEWSLETTERS:

  

  

  

We have just finished the 2014 Cloud Policy USA conference, in which C-PET was delighted to partner with Forum Global. In my closing remarks, I highlighted some core questions that this immensely significant term raises. At one level, of course, the shift to Cloud might be considered trivial - it's just time-sharing, say cynics, and we've done that for half a century. Others grasp its utility - safe, cheap storage that avoids local backup and also facilitates distance collaboration - work that is location agnostic, as FTC Commissioner Ohlhausen, one of our keynote speakers, eloquently put it. So what?

  

Well, the history of innovation is peppered with "so whats" whose naivety has soon been obvious. Which is not to say that the wilder enthusiasts for any technology's potential will always be proved right. Yet the "general purpose technologies" that have economy-wide effects bear inbuilt capacities for extraordinary impact.

  

The detail of that impac tmay not be immediately clear. One thing that always perplexes me about technology/business events is the seeming confidence of presenters who claim to track a decade ahead the number of people and dollars and nodes that will inevitably emerge from the application of A, or B, or C. That's partly because the core lesson of the exponential principle (which goes well beyond Moore's Law) is the folly of linear projections and the math they make possible. In tandem, we have the interaction of A, and B, and C - about which we may speculate or even war-game; interactions that raise the lack of clarity and therefore risk involved - exponentially. All of which leads me - as I hear the presentations and watch the PPs (and read the analyst reports) - to puzzle. We have little idea of even the business models that these exploding technologies will enable - and if that is true, all bets are off.

  

As we look back, the best example of this fact lies in what we now call search. Back when, pre-Google and their predecessors, this was not even a concept, let alone a business model. We all searched for things we had lost. We all researched things we did not know. When I was working on my Ph.D., I took the train to distant libraries for that purpose. Point is: Not only did search, perfected by Google, not exist - we were not looking for it. Vastly valuable applications will emerge at the interface of the Cloud and the Internet of Things that we have not yet imagined; while our expectations as to what is likely will fall away. This does make it hard for analysts and management consultants to write reports that generate big bucks and grasp the interest of the press. Without prejudice to the excellence of (some of) their work, the lesson of the past three decades (and the smartest sci-fi) is that the future is not an advanced version of the present. 

  

The future is, as L.P. Hartley famously said of the past, "another country: they do things differently there."

  

In my remarks I made these four points.

  1. Our engagement with the policy and economic dimensions of these emerging technologies must be Atlanticist. The transatlantic corridor between North America and Europe represents the world's most significant economic axis as well as the main line of freedom and democracy. Ever-nascent anti-Americanism in Europe, coupled with American disdain for and disinterest in Europe, offer continual challenges to the Atlanticist vision - yet it remains key to the success of Cloud and the economic revolution it will help release. It was encouraging to hear from our distinguished speakers that we have a trend toward better co-operation.
  2. It is crucial to frame this discussion in multidisciplinary terms - as policy, technology, business, values, are more closely correlated with the passage of time. Specialism is so 20th century. 
  3. In that context, the Cloud is the fundamental enabler of the Internet of Things. And the IoT has dramatic, extraordinary implications. Essentially - to use my favorite term - it offers to button the old economy to the new economy. That claim is vast, and its potential for creating value seemingly limitless.
  4. It also carries disturbing implications, since it offers to extend the already extensive digitized knowledge base of our private lives - and therefore render much more of us accessible to that triad of users of our digital information: governments, corporations, and "bad actors." (I make no comment about the extent to which governments and corporations should also be classed in that category; though there is no question that they are both capable of "bad actions.") In the post-Snowden era, the NSA's efforts now partly in the public domain show the impact of a system in which essentially all the data are accessible to anyone with the smarts and opportunity to mine them; to "data" we are in the process of adding "things." Trillions of them.

  

The Conference addressed many of these questions, which help frame our thinking on the policy implications of the Cloud.

  

Ambassador de Almeida, who heads the Mission of the European Union to the United States, took the "Cloud" metaphor further and suggested it might lead to stormy weather. As it happened, mid-afternoon my phone chirped to let me know that the excellent Red Cross Tornado app had come to life to announce a tornado watch across the DC area for the next 6 hours. (Had it been a warning, the room would have heard a dramatic, loud,"Take cover, take cover," whether or not I had the volume turned off.)  The Cloud-based Internet of Things at work.

  

The Cloud, like all systematic technological developments of general-purpose application, is fraught with risk even as it is with possibility. Candid discussion - across national boundaries, disciplines, sectors - offers our best approach to exploiting its potential for great good. While doing so non-naively.

 

  

  

  

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ON THE INTERNET OF THINGS  
 
 

  

  

I was invited to make closing remarks at the end of the second day of the conference on the Internet of Things which we co-sponsored last fall at the National Press Club (details and links below).

  

The conference was remarkable for its assemblage of corporate participants in this visionary technology area and especially for showing how start-ups and entrepreneurial small and medium-size companies are engaged alongside the behemoths. It remains remarkable that a technology so pervasive in its implications that essentially sets the Internet loose on the real world has occasioned so little conversation. 

  

I offered three observations, but let me preface them with a fourth. Let every organization - business, policy, NGO, IGO - address this theme, and explore the likely impacts, opportunities and threats, presented by the IoT. An IoT audit, if you will. Just take your business area and superimpose the limitless connectivity that the Internet offers on the analog world order in which you have operated. Whether your business is policy, ethics, knowledge, heavy industry - whatever it is - now is the time for far-sighted foresighting. 

  

First, I suggested that the IoT is the ultimate silo-busting technology. It is conventional in the 21st century both for us to laud the importance of breaking out of silos of all kinds, and to re-settle ourselves comfortably in our own. Just begin to think through the implications of "smart cities" and you realize how impossible this becomes. If, that is, your interest lies in delivering value, or addressing values. (And, as we have argued here at C-PET more than once, value and values are deeply integrated and as products become more novel and markets more fragile that integration will become increasingly evident.)  So aside from all else we have an object-lesson in why silos must go.

  

Second, the IoT offers a compelling argument for global thinking. The main focus of this event has been transatlantic, with some key participants from European perspectives and major corporate participants for whom both the European and U.S. markets are core. The next conference in this series, hosted by Forum Global, will be in Brussels in March, 2014; then back to DC in the fall. 

  

Third, the short term will not do. At C-PET we stress the need to think 5-7 years out at all times - not too far to make reasonable projections, and yet far enough to scare off those whose accountability is to either the markets or the electorate of today and tomorrow. As BlackBerry folds and Nokia totters, the need for rigorous, high-level engagement with the future has never been stronger. And as we know, it may seem counter-intuitive: As it gets harder to look ahead, it gets more critical.

  

So the Internet of Things pulls together three deep principles for our day: Breach the silos, think global, and look ahead. Truisms indeed, but as the ad-driven Internet that has elevated Facebook and Google and their like gives place to an enabling of every traditional industry sector they take fresh and heavy meaning. Implications for privacy and security rise higher as potential for adding value grows. 

  

The Federal Trade Commission, whose chair Edith Ramirez was prevented by the government shutdown from giving the opening keynote at this conference, has scheduled a November workshop to begin to address the implications of this vast enabling technology. While it may be postponed, it gives evidence that the IoT is no mere minor impact of the Internet but a systemic advance in its interconnection with the hitherto offline economy. The implications could hardly be greater.

  

Your thoughts, as ever, will be appreciated.

  

Best,

  

  

Nigel

  

  

  

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LATEST ON THE INTERNET OF THINGS, THE EVERNET, THE CLOUD OF THINGS, THE INTERNET OF EVERYTHING, THE INDUSTRIAL INTERNET....

  

A generation after its emergence as the knowledge backbone of the planet, after vastly disrupting knowledge-heavy industries such as news, publishing and book-selling, and on the verge of MOOCing higher education into dramatic, forced revamping, the Internet is beginning to integrate with the traditional economy at a more fundamental level. It promises to sweep disruption across hitherto safe havens from autos to healthcare to food, building digitally-powered and cloud-based value that will make the ad-driven screens and social brands with which we have become familiar look peripheral and flimsy. Not for nothing is GE designating this next stage the "Industrial Internet;" so that was the theme we picked for our most recent C-PET event in Washington, DC on the Internet of Things (IoT - see highlights below).

  

It's now nearly four years since C-PET joined with McKenna Long & Aldridge to host the first high-level Washington conference on the IoT. The event was by invitation. Even today there are many in the technology policy community have at best a vague idea of what this obscure phrase "Internet of Things" means. In fact, as I moderated the closing keynote of that event in 2010 by our friend Gerald Santucci, leading on this issue for the European Commission, I wondered aloud if the oddity of the phrase had been someone's attempt at dowsing concern about its implications. Informed and vigorous engagement across all sectors is, as we know, quite the healthiest way to manage the policy and broader risk implications of an emerging technology. In respect of the IoT this has been entirely lacking here in the United States.

  

Key to the success of the 2010 roundtable were the roles of Daniel Caprio (formerly of FTC and the Department of Commerce, now at McKenna Long & Aldridge), and Michael Nelson (ex-White House and FCC, now at Microsoft), both C-PET senior fellows and benchmark figures in this conversation - which is of major significance for the United States, and needs to be managed in the context of our vital transatlantic partnership as well as careful articulation with the global community.

  

And at our most recent IoT roundtable, focused especially on policy in light of the "industrial" dimension, Nelson and Caprio were joined by former CNN journalist and co-founder of Global Voices Online, Rebecca MacKinnon, and Marilyn Cade, who provides leadership to the multi-stakeholder Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in the United States.

The 2010 event led to a summative report in which we collaborated with Steve Bell of Keyso Global. Here it is, hosted by the Internet of Things Council, an EU endeavor that demonstrates how much more attention there has been in Europe to this array of emerging questions - Report on the Internet of Things .
 
  

  

For those who could not attend our August meeting, I am pasting below a lightly-edited transcript of the opening remarks with which Mike Nelson and Dan Caprio set the scene. It will serve both to tee-up this week's two-day event at the National Press Club, hosted by Forum Global, for which C-PET is serving as knowledge partner - 

keynoted by FTC Chair Edith Ramirez; and to prep for the upcoming FTC Workshop in November.

 

 

                                                                                                 

I shall look forward to seeing some of you at the Press Club this week. For those on Twitter, follow us at #iotconf, and me at @nigelcameron.  

 

 

Best,

 

 

Nigel 

 

 

Nigel Cameron

President and CEO

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies

10 G Street NE, Suite 710

Washington, DC 20002

 

 

Transcript: not for formal quotation.

  

Opening Presentations from the C-PET Summit on the Internet of Things at our G Street, NE, offices, August 2013.

  

  

Mike Nelson

This subject is slowly getting attention on this side of the Atlantic - I have given most of my talks about the Internet of Things in Brussels - because they seem to have paid a lot more attention to the implications of the Industrial Internet.  I've got an odd background - I spent time at the US Senate working for Senator Gore - the Clinton White House, FCC, and almost 10 years at IBM, and for the last 6 years I've been a professor of Internet Studies at Georgetown.  A year ago I took a full time job at Bloomberg Government and cut back my teaching at Georgetown, but I still teach classes on the Internet and on the techniques we can use to anticipate the future. - I also teach classes on Innovation.  Another affiliation besides C-PET is I'm also very involved in the DC Chapter of the Internet Society - some of our members are here today.  Uh - my job - in my 20 years in Washington has been to try and future proof policy.  So I have been the guy in the room, the technologist in the room, who puts his hand up and says "you lawyers know the law, let me tell you about the technology that doesn't quite purport with your legal models.  And I think that's what we have today and we have a really good discussion about how legal concepts are going to collide with the Internet of Things or the Industrial Internet. Let me just hit on a couple of quick things.  At Georgetown I teach in a program called "Communication, Culture and Technology", so I'm going to talk on those three things very briefly. Let me start by talking about Communications, because this is really important in this area  It is a new technology - and it's really sort of a new vision that isn't very well defined, and the words we pick really matter.

  

Back in the 90's the Japanese and Mark Weiser talked about "Ubiquitous Computing," and that was sort of the first idea that everything was going to be connected.  Then, in 1999, the term Internet of Things was coined, and we go to this idea that it wasn't just people and keyboards; it was going to be devices, from thermostats, to refrigerators to cars.  The ITU helped publicize that term.  More recently IBM has spent a lot of money on the Smarter Planet campaign - which is all about networking sensors - importantly - they are more focused on what happens with the data that comes from those sensors and devices than they are on the devices themselves.  And they have probably spent more than anybody educating Americans and people around the world on the potential for the Industrial Internet.  The Industrial Internet is a term that GE has popularized, not surprisingly, since they work a lot with heavy industry.  The other big term, due to our friends at CISCO - Bob Pepper's here - is the Internet of Everything.  But that isn't quite the same as the Industrial Internet or the Internet of Things because it really is EVERTHING - according to CISCO - it is people, process, data and things.  There is another cute word that I kind of like, and that is "Evernet," as in everything, is connected everywhere, every time.  Nelson's rule of buzz words is that you actually only get three syllables.  So, all of the things I've mentioned, except for Evernet, don't work.  


Evernet is actually a term that came out about 12 years ago.  My term is Cloud of Things.  And you will find that in this article that we have passed around - and I actually think that's the preferred term.  But I can tell you the worst term - there is now a phrase that we are living in the "Post Mobile World."  Just like we were living in the "Post PC" world.  Nelson's second rule of buzz words is never to define something by what it is not.  So - anyway - the Cloud of Things, I think, is an appropriate term.  It may not be the best term, but it gives us several things.  

  

  • It focuses us on the data, which live in the cloud, not just on the devices.  
  • It focuses on the data, and not just the network
  • It focuses on the fact that it may not be the Internet that these things are connected with.   

  

In some cases you have home networks, they are using different protocols - they are actually NOT the classic Internet.  Or you have near-field devices, and other radio devices, that are not technically the Internet.  Another reason I like Cloud of Things is because if focuses policy-makers on the data, and how it might be used or abused, rather than thinking they have to regulate every little sensor.  When you say Internet of Things in Europe they immediately think - oh - this is a good business for regulators - we are going to have 100 billion devices to regulate.  They really should be focusing on the cloud, and where the data goes, and how it gets used. The other thing that is really important about the phrase Cloud of Things is that it shows the incredible linkage between the cloud, sensors and big data. That is a theme that I'm going to keep coming back to, because I think there is a really exciting opportunity here, to take all of this data that is streaming in, and use the tools that are developing in the big data space, to combine disparate data sets, that in the past we couldn't combine, or we didn't think of combining, to provide really radically new services.  One thing you learn very quickly when you start reading about this topic is that the forecast of where we are going to go with the Internet of Things, or the Industrial Internet, or the Cloud of Things vary tremendously.  One thing they all agree with is that there are going to be a lot more devices.  In 2008 we already passed the point where there are more devices connected to the net then people.  But we are looking at a world where there are going to be 10s of billions, hundreds of billions of devices - and depending upon how you count it, we might have trillions of devices in 15 years.  The problem is, these numbers are not really comparing the same thing.  In some cases, people are measuring very expensive sensors to come up with a relatively low number.  And other people are measuring every RFID tag, that may come in a slab of meat you buy, used once and thrown away.  But the fact is that we are going to have to manage hundreds of billions of devices. Now CISCO says this is happening very quickly. That by 2020 we will have 50 billion devices connected to the net, and that doesn't even include all of the individual sensors that are connected - through Ether devices - to the net.  

  

The other thing that is very clear is that policy- makers are going to have a lot of new challenges, starting at the bottom of the stack and going up (thinking the classic Internet stack).  The first step is getting these things connected, so we have to find new spectrum, to make sure that these devices will be supported.  Some of these devices are very simple.  They just chirp a few hundred bits of data - that is not a big demand - in other cases they will be pumping out high resolution video.  And it is not just spectrum.  We also have to make sure that we have a ubiquitous network - so we also have to have a wire line network that can reach - and the antennas that are going to provide the last lap.  Because many of the most exciting applications really only work if you can use them everywhere.  Another issuer is identifiers - how are we going to keep track of these devices? Right now - we have several different competing systems. People want to identify where these devices are, and what they are, and how they can connect.  Another really interesting issue we don't talk very much about is digital trade.  These devices are going to be going everywhere and data will be collected and processed in ways that require moving a lot of information, some of it sensitive, confidential business information, or confidential personal information across borders.  How will that be factored into trade agreements?  But the biggest issues, the ones we always talk about, that we will probably spend a good third to half of our time talking about, are the security/privacy aspects.  We have enough problems today, we people at keyboards, and on smart phone - now each of us will have 50 or 100 devices, interacting with the net, collecting data, and if that is not done in a secure way, that provides privacy, gives some transparency to the process, we are going to have a very slow uptake on some of the very exciting applications that we are talking about today.  This gets very interesting, particularly in surveillance societies,  probably about half of the nations in world, where dictators and police departments are going to use some of these technologies to track people much better then they can today.  Today - maybe an individual has a smart phone we can track.  In the future we will be tracking cars, using sensors on the roadways, video cameras, even drones - which will actually be part of the Internet of Things - as well.  But the most interesting thing to me, the one that will probably cause the biggest headache for politicians, and for lawyers, is sort of the second order effects.  I mentioned earlier how the Industrial Internet will spur the development of big data and the cloud.  We already have some very good reports on the policy implications of big data and how by mining all this wealth of data we are going to be able to pinpoint individuals for good purposes, like customized apps, and for bad purposes, like suppressing dissent.   Another very important issue will be displacing of workers.  When Google's self driving car is out there, and we start having self-driving trucks, there could be a million people -  truck drivers - who don't have a job.  That is also part of the Internet of Things.

  

Another interesting second order effect is how the Internet of Things , and the Sensor Nets, could conceivably make markets more effective and take away a large chunk of people's profits. Let me give you an example.  My Ph. D. is in Seismology. In California it really matters where your house is - how close it is to a fault, if it is on particularly shaky ground.  Sensors are now being put out thousands at a time to sense Earth vibrations and to find out where the most vulnerable neighborhoods are.  That could dramatically change the real estate values in certain neighborhoods.  So these technologies will have winners and losers.    

  

Let me finish by mentioning some non-policy issues - things that involve technology.  I am a technologist, so I usually start by talking about technology, but there are several things that we have to get right as we roll out the Internet of Things.  One is better encryption. The tendency with these devices is to make them as cheap as possible.  On the other hand, if we don't encrypt the data that's coming from them, that's not going to be good.  We also want to make our network more secure, make sure that people are not able to add devices into the network and spoof - imply that it is somebody else's device. That requires public key infrastructure, and we have to start really designing the system in a way that is robust. One of my biggest worries is that if we roll this out, we are going to fine tune it in such a way - and cut costs in such a way - that there is no redundancy - there is no backup.  One of the attractions of the Internet of Things is "Oh - we are going to use our resources so much better -  we are going to be able to manage our taxi fleet, our fleet of trucks, in a way where can get a lot more goods delivered more quickly - on the other hand - that relies on everything working exactly right - so we might get too excited about these technologies and the data they provide, and we might - in order to cut costs - not realize that reliability must be in the equation as well.  

  

So - three things to watch - places that you might not be watching.

  

One is the European Union is now considering its data protection regulation.  Another interesting model is what's happening at NTIA right now - where they are trying to come up with a way to keep mobile phone users, and smart phone users, aware of privacy that they have when they use those devices, or in many cases, the privacy they don't have when they use those apps.  That may be a model - they way that process has come together - all the players - from the people that want to do direct marketing to the app designers to technologists - to the network people - all coming together to figure out a way to address privacy.  And the last thing I'll point you to - is the FCC has something called the Computer Security, Reliability and Interoperability Council - CSRIC. That's not something on the front page of the paper very often, but doing some very interesting work on how to make networks more secure. I would highlight - in addition to the materials by GE and IBM - next week the progressive policy institute is planning to publish a very interesting report on the Industrial Internet and some of the Economic Benefits that we could get from this.  I think part of their conclusion is that we are not going to capture all of the benefits in our economic statistics in the way that we do things now.   We need to actually change the way we measure economic growth if we are going to actually understand all the ways in which these technologies help us.  I hope I've kept this to 10 minutes, I hope I've been provocative.  

  

NC:  14:45 - but Mike, thank you very much - that was terrific

  

MN:  Thank you for not being rude and cutting me off.  

  

NC: Had you been sitting on my immediate right, you never know (laughs).  Dan Caprio, go ahead and please introduce yourself - the people have the print.    

  

Daniel Caprio:  Thanks Nigel - and, thank you very much for hosting and for continuing to keep the discussion of the Internet of Things alive.  It is really exciting to see so many people in this room interested in the Internet of Things.  Back in the day - and the day wasn't that long ago - we could have had that meeting in a phone booth (laughs).  So - just a little interactive question - just a show of hands - raise you hand if this the first time that you have become acquainted, or if this the first time you have been to a briefing, on the Internet of Things?  That's good. Okay - so - show of hands if you have been thinking, or working, or been involved in this in the last, say, 3 to 5 years (largest response).  So - most in this room.  So - how about in the last 5 to 10 year range?  I see....

  

Well - my background is - like a lot of folks in Washington - I spent time, early in my career on Capitol Hill , in the House and the Senate.  I spent a good number of years at the Federal Trade Commission, and then was fortunate enough to be the Chief Privacy Officer at the Department of Commerce and was also dual-hatted as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy, which meant that I needed to think about Innovation and Privacy all the time - everywhere.  And so - I've done enough presentations with Mike to know - well - my bumper sticker - the Internet of Things - is really a way to enable Innovation, and the key is really to protect privacy.  So it got started almost a decade ago - back when we were talking about RFID, and tags and sensors.  And the European Commission got very involved in RFID, and they were very concerned about surveillance. I was the Transatlantic subject- matter expert to the European Commission to their expert group on the Internet of Things, and we've spent the last two or three years in Brussels sort of looking at the Internet of Things in the rear view mirror of RFID.  And it was an exercise that sort of points out that with the Internet of Things - context is important. As this becomes more and more discussed in the US - we have got to think about things in a more practical sense. The Europeans love to have discussions of what is, well, theoretically possible. Which is fine, but what that leads you to is a discussion in which you never get to the benefits.  Thankfully, we have been working with the Commission, and the Commission is now much more focused on data regulation.  And in their infinite wisdom, they finally have sort of taken a technology neutral approach to the Internet of Things.  What that means is that after initially considering this, and thinking we need separate regulation because it's new, it's unique it's novel - so we need a separate system of governance - well, it is none of those things.  The Commission has decided to take a much more technology neutral approach, which sort of leads us to where we are today.

 

Here in the United States, it is as if all things are new. We really are at an inflection point in the US. We all see the potential that the Internet of Things - you know - as CISCO points out - really has the potential to be bigger than the Internet economy itself.  Now really is our chance to embed the right policy framework.  But I think that - one of the ways - I like to draw analogies or comparisons - the Internet of Things really has the potential - you will really appreciate this Nigel - really has a lot of comparisons to Nano.  You know, back in the day, everybody was thinking about Nano in terms of "what is the Industry, what is the sector."  It turns out that Nano is in everything - and that is the way the Internet of Things is going to be.  Mike mentioned the relationship between the cloud, big data, the Internet of Things - I see them as being all related and sitting on a computing continuum - they are all interrelated, and it is a matter of connecting the dots in terms of the societal benefits. Mike mentioned the Smart Planet, Smart Transportation, Smart Grid - there are just enormous benefits.  But when we think about this as a policy matter, the context does matter.  And one of the things that we are facing, which is a nice opportunity, is the Federal Trade Commission having a workshop on the Internet of Things on November 19.  And what I hope the FTC will do - unlike the European Commission, that looked at the context of let's think about every hypothetical harm - that the Commission will look at the practical implications and the glass being half full as opposed to being half empty.  It is also going to be important for the FTC and others to dispel some of the mythology, of things that theoretically possible and scientifically possible that really aren't based in reality.  So the FTC workshop is going to be very important; the way the FTC does its workshops is really is an opportunity to educate itself.


Mike talked about the importance of the transatlantic dialogue - what the Commission is doing right now, where they are struggling - the Commission, Parliament, the Member States, Council - they are struggling to kind of come up with an interoperable policy framework; and they view privacy as a fundamental human right.  And so they view the Internet of Things very differently than we view it over here. But it is really going to be important to continue to pay attention to what the Commission is doing with data regulation. One other issue we might mention - trade - in particular with the EU in the context of TTIP - the U.S./EU free trade agreement.  That's obviously going to have a chapter on privacy and security, and gives us another good opportunity to effect a policy framework. In terms of the policy framework itself, we need to be looking at an evidence-based model. There was so many times when we were in Brussels when we would be at the table and civil society groups would say, "you know, there has been a market failure in the Internet of Things," and we said, "well, that's interesting, because we can't even agree on what the Internet of Things is, and secondly, if you are ready to declare a market failure, then what is the evidence." My other big theory on this, and Mike alluded to this in terms of ubiquitous computing and distributed networking, is that the model that we have now, the notice and choice model, is just broken. It worked well in a centralized hierarchical system in the 1980s, we've got the OECD privacy guidelines to be revised in modern language, and that's all fine, but what - where this really challenges policy-makers is if we keep focusing on collection, collection , collection, then it is not going to be possible to reap the benefit of the Internet of Things.  And so, I think, where this gives us an opportunity is to think about how technology can come along and take some of the burden off of the consumer. I think this is going to be the big challenge of the next decade or so - working an industry resolution to define what accountability means, what are privacy and security by design mean, and how you think about privacy and security as two sides of the same coin.  But again, one of the challenges of big data, and the Internet of Things, and the cloud is that they are not about straightforward information; sometimes when it is collected you don't know how it is going to be used, and, I mean for better or for worse.  I think we need to get out of thinking so much about collection, and to broaden that back out to use, and -

my final point  - and Mike alluded to this as well - but in terms of privacy and security, we need to really consider what we want to protect.  So, in the U.S., of course, we have a sectorial approach - medical, financial, children. In the world of the Internet of Things there are obviously more things that are sensitive - right - if it is underwriting for insurance, or other kinds of inferences or things that are important in terms of credit, for instance.  We need to be having that discussion, and figuring out what's important to protect and then how do we protect it, and then what's the technology- that is available - in terms of encryption, and how do we do it?  

 

One last word - in addition to the EU - that I think has called a little bit of a regulatory pause as they think of the data regulation - is this is really, really big in China. The Chinese government has been investing millions, probably billions.  They have made a big, big bet on the Internet of Things and some of it is kind of techno nationalist, but they view this as a way to really jump up the supply chain and compete for high value-added jobs.  They see this as a big driver of economic development, and I'll let you draw your own conclusions about the surveillance implications, but, the Chinese have adopted a very top-down approach. They have big designs for the Internet of Things.  So with that I'll turn it back over to you. Nigel.

  

  

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

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The 4th Annual George Washington University (GW) Global Entrepreneurship conference brings together leading members of the entrepreneurship research and public policy communities to discuss the latest trends in business creation.

 

Conference activities, which include keynote panels, research presentations and networking events, take full advantage of the intense focus on policy development in Washington, DC and the collaboration between The George Washington University (GW), the International Council for Small Business (ICSB), The World Bank Group, the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies (C-PET) in developing this conference.

  

Conference Overview 

  

Wednesday, October 16: Pre-Conference Training Programs 

  

Thursday: Marketplace at the World Bank 

  

  •  Exhibitors promoting entrepreneurship data sets related to firm creation, entrepreneurship, or small business (broadly defined) are invited to attend.

    • Some confirmed exhibitors include;

      • Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM)

      • GEDI Index - George Mason University

      • World Enterprise Survey - The World Bank Group            

      • Women, Business and the Law - The World Bank Group               

      • Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise Country Indicators - The World Bank Group

      • National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) Small Business Economic Trends

      • Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) - The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

      • U.S. Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED)

      • Business Employment Dynamics (BED) - The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

      • Business Establishment Dynamics - The U.S. Census, Center for Economic Studies

      • Kauffman Firm Survey (KFS) - The Kauffman Foundation

      • Doing Business - The World Bank Group

      • Women's Finance Hub - The World Bank Group

      • Global Entrepreneurs Enabler Index (GEEIndex)

          

  • Friday: Public Policy Day at GW School of Business

    • Public Policy Day includes activities organized by the Conference's Co-Chairs for Public Policy around three main topical areas: (1) Alternative funding instruments for start-ups and SMEs; (2) SMEs' participation  in global value chains, or foreign markets; and (3) Fostering SMEs involvement in R&D and  innovation.

      • OECD -- Dr. Salvatore Zecchini, Chairman of the OECD Working Group on SMEs and Entrepreneurship and

      • SBA -- Mr. Giuseppe Gramigna, Chief Economist, U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA).

    • Some confirmed speakers include;

      • Mr. Jeff Hoffman, Partner at ColorJar

      • Mr. Zoltan Acs, Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Public Policy; and Professor at George Mason University (GMU)

      • Dr. Carl Johan Sundberg, Coordinator Science & Society at the President's office, Department of Physiology & Pharmacology/Unit for Bioentrepreneurship, Karolinska Institutet

      • Ms. Esperanza Lasagabaster, Service Line Manager, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, The World Bank Group

      • Dr. Armen Orujyan, Founder and Chairman, Athgo International

      • Dr. Nigel Cameron, President, Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies (C-PET)

  •  

    Friday Evening, October 18, 2013 - Black Tie Gala at U.S. Chamber of Commerce

The ICSB Foundation Black Tie Gala and presentation of the Three Luminaries Awards at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Friday night is a highlight of this event.   

-- Visit our website to learn more about the Three Luminaries Award.

  • Saturday: Research Day at GW School of Business

The final day of the conference includes a full day of peer-reviewed author presentations. Presentations based on any form of empirical data (surveys, field studies, secondary analysis of existing data, etc) related to the emergence, survival, growth, or impact of new or entrepreneurial firms are encouraged to submit by August 15, 2013.Please contact the conference committee at icsb@gwu.edu to discuss anything related to the conference, including registration, sponsorship opportunities and the event schedule.

  

Details and registration 

  

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Of American Independence in C21:

Four Considerations as we look ahead

  

Nigel Cameron

  

As July 4 rolls around, it is the most natural thing in the world for Americans to look back. Each nation is defined by its past, the pull of history a potent shaper of present identity. While this is true of all nations, and explains the pathologies of many, when the nation is the United States it bears especial significance. For this nation alone may be seen, and sees itself, as a construct. A voluntary society, isolated in splendor by shining seas. One nation determined not by race, as are most, but ultimately by will. A nation that though birthed in a colonial revolt determined - atop the best of the 18th century enlightenment - to be defined by a set of ideas. And at its best, which has been often, it has stood true to them. Its pull and unique welcome for the foreign-born (this writer included) derive from exactly that fact. As Allen Bloom memorably states in The Closing of the American Mind, one can become an American in an afternoon. (He adds, pointedly, Can one imagine anyone, even in a lifetime, becoming French?)

  

Yet there is here an irony buried deep, and unearthing it is so central to the future of America and its global role that it is hard to make this point too often or forcibly. Since America is defined not by people or land but by ideas and history, the importance of looking back cannot be denied. But if we look back what we see is a young nation looking forward. America has been defined by the future from its first beginnings. As the nation ages, as it loses confidence in what once seemed to be certainties, as it enters an environment defined not by stasis but by flux, the stakes are raised. Confident in our past, we must look to the future as did once the founders. And as we do, we confront seismic shifts of at least three kinds. They interlock and engage one another, but they are distinct. Their cumulative impacts, especially when they align, have begun to determine our world in 2013 - and will shape whatever lies ahead. Unless this nation, and its democratic embodiment in the governance community of Washington, DC, can embrace each of them, whatever significance our independence once had will be steadily, and soon, reduced to a chimera.

  

  1. We are moving post-stasis.

Not that anything has ever been entirely static. But whether our focus is on Fordist approaches to manufacturing in the first half of the 20th century, or the Cold War that locked international affairs in place for much of the second half, our experience has been of long periods of stasis. Plainly, while those periods have been getting progressively shorter (Byzantium, the eastern Roman Empire, lasted one thousand years; the British Empire, the most geographically extensive the world has seen, perhaps 200), it has been a stately progress - so that strategies, schools of thought, and careers, could be built for a generation. It is not simply that these periods of stasis are getting shorter. They are ceasing to be. To pick up one of my favorite analogies, that of Thomas H. Kuhn's model of "normal science" and occasional "revolutionary science," we are moving deeper and deeper into a period of constantly "revolutionary" affairs. The stasis is that there is none any more.

  

  1. 2. We are moving post-symmetry.

  

This was, of course, the chief lesson of 9/11. I make no comment on whether our response in security terms was appropriate. But the underlying fact was much less the threat posed to the United States by Bin Laden and his gang than the fact that a gang of individuals could engage the international arena at the strategic level. While there have always been terrorists of one kind or another, their capacities had never risen to that level. Ironically, while Bin Laden employed technology, it was old technology - aging planes, and television. As the networks dutifully broadcast the image of the collapsing towers literally hundreds of times the gang with their box-cutters and willingness to give up their lives had America's image, and its self-image, on the ropes. Cue portable WMDs and we begin to see what is now becoming possible. And in parallel, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, with troves of secret information and instant global dissemination, have left us stumbling. No na�ve answers to offer here; but the seismic shift into a fundamentally asymmetric environment is going to prove enormously difficult for our lumbering security establishment to grasp. The 20th century was one for Goliaths. In the 21st, David rules. Go watch that great dawn-of-the-internet movie War Games again.

  

  

       3.
  1. We  are moving post-Westphalia.

  

The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 is seen as the baseline for the birth of the modern nation state - and therefore, by extension, of the modern world order with its structure of alliances and inter-governmental organizations between such states. There's no question but that the Westphalian order is in growing disarray. The asymmetries to which we have already drawn attention offer one example. The growing awareness of the significance of those termed somewhat disdainfully "non-state actors" makes the point, but we need to go much further. We are entering not a stage in which such interlopers make life more complex but in which the nation state, and therefore the world order dependent on the inter-relations of such states, become increasingly undefined; in which perhaps the analogy of multi-stakeholder governance - a term we have employed for the global internet - becomes the best model for our understanding of the emerging world order. There are many factors in play, all the way from the globalization of markets (including capital markets) to the impact of what we presently term social media in gathering "global publics" around views and interests across all borders (a movement barely begun), which will be enabled in part by increasingly effective translation technology -and in part by growing disinterest in democratic process within the democracies and growing interest in governance within the non-democracies (the overwhelming, vigorous interest of the Chinese in social media is a phenomenon of the age).

  

Point is: every year that passes, change of all kinds accelerates; asymmetries become more evident; and the role of the nation state lessens. The impact of this trifecta on American independence as the global hegemon has yet to be assessed. But the disinclination of our governing class to embark on the task of assessment is palpable.

  

Which raises a fourth and concluding consideration. While much of the rhetoric we hear from outside, and in some degree inside, the Washington Beltway is to the effect that we are too partisan, the real problem is very different. Partisanship can cause difficulties, but at the heart of democracy lies vigorous debate (and for what it's worth the balancing factor of which we have too little is not "bipartisanship" but leadership, sinewous leadership on both sides of the aisle). If there is a broad problem, it is the deep bipartisanship evinced by Washington that sets the agenda, decides the weighting of the questions, and looks backwards rather than forwards as the debate proceeds. The (bipartisan) "partisanship of the present" is the problem. Left to itself, the past will always set the questions for the present. What we need are partisans of the future. By which I mean, without a partisanship of the future, whatever challenges the United States faces today and tomorrow will grow immeasurably. If we insist on looking back, and do not hear the founders as they yell at us to look ahead, it's all over.

.

Yet I do not demean the questions of today with which the past has bequeathed us. The issue is to set them in the proper context. How does immigration look if we face the implications of our essentially outsourcing many millions of jobs to AIs? Every employment discussion assumes a broadly steady-state future. What are the assumptions about the future being made by the CBO and other bodies - do we add Kurzweil's projections to, say, Rifkin's and divide by two? Every budget discussion is premised on scenarios that we are not consciously examining. What does it mean to talk about security in a dawning age of garage synthetic biology and vastly enhanced 3-D printing? The SOPA explosion and in some degree the current NSA PRISM debate have shown how our traditional political spectrum, with its seemingly built-in left-right agenda, is falling into desuetude. The emerging phenomenon of "exopolitics" on which I have written before ties that together with the Tea Party and Occupy and other movements, which reveal growing if inchoate public disenchantment with the framing of the questions in the Washington bullring. The issues of tomorrow are by no means all about technology. But tech infuses them, is a major driver of ever-faster change, and features far too little in our politicians' understanding of what will matter in 5 and 10 years' time.

  

If American independence is to be of enduring value, then it is to the future and its questions that we must turn our minds.

 
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