Gores full remarks at the NPC on NII and Telecom part 1 of 3

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

                           THE WHITE HOUSE


                    Office of the Press Secretary


_____________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release                               December 21, 1993




                    REMARKS BY THE VICE PRESIDENT
            AT THE NATIONAL PRESS CLUB NEWSMAKER LUNCHEON


                         National Press Club
                           Washington, DC






1:12 P.M. EST




             THE VICE PRESIDENT:  Thank you very much, ladies and
gentlemen.  And Clayton Boyce, thank you for your introduction.  I
want to also thank Reginald Stuart, Chair of the Speakers Committee
who is a longtime close friend, and with him I served as a journalist
at the National Tennessean some years ago.


             Let me also acknowledge some of the distinguished guests
who are present.  I know that I will miss several, but I want to
start by acknowledging Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown, who in
addition to his other duties within the administration is the
Chairman of the Information Infrastructure Task Force and has worked
very closely with me and our administration team in putting together
the legislation that I'm going to talk about in general terms here
today and on communications policy generally, and has been providing
outstanding leadership for the administration.


             Also Laura Tyson, who is not only Chairman of the
Council of Economic Advisers but a key member of that working group
on communications that has been meeting weekly in the White House for
quite a long time now, working through the issues involved here.  May
I also acknowledge out in the audience President Clinton's nominee
and the newly confirmed Chairman of the Federal Communications
Commission, a longtime friend, Reed Hundt.


             I want to say that it's a great pleasure to be here
after a lengthy trip to Russia and Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan and
Germany.  I still have jet lag, though -- nature's way of making you
look like your passport photograph.  (Laughter.)  I can assure you
that I have fully readjusted from the trip and -- I'm waiting for the
interpreter to finish that.  (Laughter.)  Actually I'm really happy
to be home and I'm very happy to be talking about telecommunications
to people whose lives will be shaped by the changes ahead for us.


             How we engineer those changes is critically important.
There are good ways to do it and there are bad ways to do it.  It's a
little bit like the story that Governor Ned McWherter tells
frequently in Tennessee, and I'm sure many of you have heard it,
about the veterinarian and the taxidermist who went into business
together; and the sign on the front of their establishment said
"either way you get your dog back."  (Laughter.)  For those in the
communications policy business, that might be an example of the need
to unbundle some services.  (Laughter.)


             I'm pleased to announce today that at the beginning of
the new year, President Clinton will present to Congress a package of
legislative and administrative proposals on telecommunications.


             Today, I want to talk about the future that we envision.
But I'd like to start by talking about an incident from the past.
There's a lot of romance surrounding the sinking of the Titanic 91

years ago.  But when you strip away the romance, a tragic story
emerges that tells us a lot about human beings and something about
telecommunications.  Why did the ship that couldn't be sunk steam
full speed ahead into an ice field -- for in the last few hours
before the Titanic hit the iceberg, other ships were sending messages
like this one from the Mesaba -- latitude 42 north and so forth --saw
much heavy pack ice and a great number of large icebergs, also ice
field.  Why when the Titanic operators sent distress signal after
distress signal did so few ships respond?


             Well, the answer as the investigations after the tragedy
proved is that the wireless radio business at that time was just
that, a business.  Operators had no obligation to remain on duty to
listen for important messages that might carry some warning.  They
were to do what was profitable and nothing else.  When the day's work
was done, often consisting of the lucrative transmissions from
wealthy passengers, operators shut off their sets and caught up on
their sleep.


             In fact, when the last ice warnings were sent that
night, the Titanic operators were awake, but they were too involved
sending those private messages from the well-to-do in order to listen
to incoming messages.  And when they sent the distress signals after
the collision, the operators on the other ships had themselves gone
to bed.  The distress signals couldn't be heard, in other words,
because the airwaves were chaotic.  Willy-nilly transmissions without
regulation.  The Titanic wound up two miles under the surface of the
North Atlantic, in part, because people had not yet realized that
radio was not simply a curiosity, but could be a way to save lives.


             Ironically, that tragedy resulted in the first efforts
to bring some order to the airwaves.  Government got involved because
there are certain public needs that sometimes outweigh private
interest.  Today, as divers explore the hulk of the Titanic, we face
a similar problem.  A new world awaits us.  It is one that cannot
only save lives but utterly change and enrich lives.  And we need to
rethink the role of government once more in order to balance private
needs and public interest.


             It is important in discussing the information age that
we discuss not merely technology but the essence of communications.
Because from communications comes community.  For example, not long
ago when travel was very difficult, communities were small and
communication was personal and direct between families, neighbors,
those doing business together.  Then the means of travel improved,
moving us all away from each other and making communication more
difficult.  Until recently, for example, if an immigrant came to the
United States from England or France or China or Russia, it meant
saying good-bye to one's family that stayed in the Old World and
never having a conversation with them again.


             Now we see television advertisements from companies
competing for the lucrative business of communicating -- of providing
the communications links between families that are separated by the
oceans.  And technology has brought us together in other ways as
well.  I read a little while ago about a family that was scattered in
many countries around the world, where in more than a hundred
different members of the same family keep in touch through the
Internet.  They keep people informed of births and deaths and
graduations, and children in dozens of countries who have never met
each other feel as if they know each other and understand the bonds
of family.


             Last week, when I was in Kyrgyzstan, President Akayev of
that country said that his eight-year-old son said to him, "Father, I
must learn English."  He said, "Why?"  He said, "Because the computer
speaks English."  (Laughter.)



             Our world is being brought closer together.  And it's
important in focusing on what is ahead in communications to zero in,
not just on the technology, but on what we use the technology for.
When one of those families wants to communicate across the oceans,
they don't say let's use the telephone, they say, let's call
grandmother.


             We haven't always kept that distinction in mind.  You
may know the story about the reaction in London at the Stock Exchange
when the telephone was first invented and someone said, "Who needs so
many telephones; we have messenger boys."  It didn't take long to see
that there were some things those messenger boys couldn't do, like
handling two-way communication in the same conversation.  We figured
out new uses each time those telephones changed from wooden boxes on
the wall to desk phones to more convenient models with long cords,
and then cordless phones and car phones and cell phones that allow us
to talk while we drive or while we walk.


             We'll go through the same process again with the changes
that are in store over the next decade.  And make no mistake about
it, these changes coming in the related fields of telecommunications
and computing and telephony and the other related fields are going
together to make up one of the most powerful revolutions in the
entire history of humankind.


             Today, most people are primarily receivers of
information through the electronic media.  We watch television, we
listen to the radio.  In this coming decade, we will each transmit
more and more information as well over the same lines of
communication.  We send and receive, not just on the telephone as we
do now, but across the full range of the new technologies.  Each
person will turn from being just a consumer to being a consumer and a
provider.


             In a way, this change represents another kind of
empowerment.  The quality revolution in the factory treats each
individual as a source of added value.  The communications revolution
recognizes each individual as a source of information that adds value
to our community and to our economy.  After all, interactive
television will not mean just yelling at the television when the
referee makes a bad call -- (laughter) -- it will mean holding a
business meeting without leaving your living room.  It will mean that
people at home can use the television set not simply as passive
entertainment but as an active tool.  These changes are coming not
overnight or out of the blue, rather they are the outgrowth of a
steady series of changes that encompass much of our history.


             It used to be that nations were more or less successful
in their competition with other nations depending upon the quality of
their transportation infrastructure.  The nation with the best deep
water ports or the most efficient railroads had a competitive
advantage over others.  And we began to think about infrastructure in
those terms.  After World War II tens of millions of American
families first purchased automobiles and thousands of businesses
began to rely on trucks every single day, we quickly found our
network of two-lane highways to be hopelessly inadequate.  And so we
built a network of interstate highways.  And that contributed
enormously to our post-war economic dominance of the world.


             Well, today commerce rolls not just on asphalt highways
but along information highways.  And tens of millions of American
families and businesses now use computers and find that the two-lane
information roads built for telephone service are no longer adequate.
It's not that we have a shortage of information -- indeed, we often
now have a lot more than we know what to do with.


             It was said once that John Stuart Mill, who lived
through much of the 19th century was described as the last man to

know everything.  Since his time, no matter what field you chose it
was hopeless to expect that you could have an approximation of the
entirety of knowledge in that field.


             We face a much more serious version of that problem now.
Take just one brief example, the Landsat satellite.  We're trying to
understand the global environment, and the Landsat satellite is
capable of taking a complete photograph of the Earth's surface every
18 days and has been up there for 20 years.  And yet 95 percent of
all of the images it has made have never been seen by human eyes,
have never fired off a single neuron in a single human brain.  The
images are just stored in electronic silos.  It's sort of like the
criticism of our old agricultural policy where we stored lots and
lots of grain in silos and let it rot while millions starved to
death.  Now, similarly we have an insatiable hunger for knowledge as
we try to find the information we need to solve the challenging
problems that confront us; and yet in many cases the information just
sits rotting away unused.


             Part of the problem has to do with a change in the way
we configure and present information.  Someone once said that if we
tried to use computer terms to describe the way our brains operate,
we could say that we have a low bit rate but very high resolution --
meaning that, for example, the telephone company decided a few years
ago that seven numbers presented bit by bit -- seven numbers was the
most we could contain in short-term memory.  That's a low bit rate.
Then they added three more numbers.  (Laughter.)


             On the other hand, we can absorb billions of bits of
information if they are arrayed in a pattern that is recognizable,
like a human face or a galaxy of stars.  In order to communicate
richly detailed images of a kind that allow us to deal with large
quantities of information, we have to combine two technologies --
first, computers and then transmission lines or networks.  Computers
now have a rapidly growing capacity to transform data into
recognizable patterns or images that allow us to use them handily.
And we're making greater use of them every year.


             But in order to communicate those images or those
conglomerations of vast quantities of data among ourselves, we need
networks capable of carrying those images to every house and
business.  We know how to do that technologically, but in order to
accomplish it, we have to unscramble the legal regulatory and
financial problems that have thus far threatened our ability to
complete such a network.


             In the few places where such a capacity now exists, we
are already using it to communicate in ways that enrich and even save
our lives.  For example, we use it with Matthew Meredith, a six-year-
old boy who recently underwent a bone marrow transplant.  His doctors
recommended that because his immune system was still gaining
strength, he shouldn't begin his classes in Topeka at the Randolph
Elementary School.  So the school and the local telephone company
teamed up to bring first grade to him through two-way video services
and a television camera.  He was able to take part in class --Matthew
used a fax machine to hand in his assignments and participate in
class almost as if he was right there.  The kids in his class got a
glimpse of video conferencing technology that will be common in a few
years.


             In West Virginia, doctors are using the Mountaineer
Doctor Television Project to link with specialists at West Virginia
University.  A while back, two month old Zachary Buchanan had an
irregular heartbeat.  Using the network his family doctor sent an
image of his heart to a pediatric cardiologist a hundred miles away.
The diagnosis -- that the condition wasn't serious -- meant that
Zachary did not have to travel halfway across the state for
treatment.



             All of these applications will enhance the quality of
life and will spur economic growth.  After all, even the quickest
glance at the telecommunications sector of the economy shows what it
means for jobs.  Over half of the U.S. work force is now in jobs that
are information-based.  The telecommunications and information sector
of the U.S. economy now accounts for more than 12 percent of the
Gross Domestic Product.  And it's growing much faster than any other
sector of our economy.