Forward Looking Policy, Additional Knowledge of Spectrum Availability Needed, DelBene Says

"One of the biggest things we can do is" educate, DelBene said. "One of the challenges we have in setting policy on technology in many ways, is we have a lot of folks who don’t use technology always. Helping folks understand technology and the way it works so that they can be more informed when they’re thinking about what impacts [certain policies] might have is critically important." DelBene said most technology issues are not partisan but are about education and ensuring policymakers understand the impact legislation can have on certain business models. "In general, our job is to put together policy that supports innovation but isn’t necessarily focused on one business model or the other or one type of business or another," she said, saying it can be a challenge to be business-neutral. "But if we can make sure folks are educated and understand not only what technology is in place today, but where things are headed and what to watch out for, that will be critically important."

Knowledge of spectrum is also a critical issue, said DelBene, and one of the challenges facing Congress is to make sure it thinks through spectrum and understands how to make sure they optimize its use. "That's, I think, got to be an ongoing part of the conversation," she said. "We have folks who have spectrum and have kind of owned blocks of spectrum in the past, even though we might have opportunities to be more thoughtful about how we share spectrum, still folks don’t want to let go. For the Internet to continue to thrive, we need to make sure that we also keep up with spectrum and availability of spectrum, and understand the different types of spectrum that will be needed with [IoT] devices." DelBene said policymaking and updating certain out of date laws can be a challenge because of the speed at which Congress moves: "Congress, which does not move quickly in many cases, needs to update laws to keep up to date with technology, yet it’s a huge challenge because as a body we don’t necessarily work at the same pace that the technology world moves."

Dean Brenner, Qualcomm senior vice president-government affairs, said the only limit to the IoT is imagination, and said no one is certain where the IoT is headed. To create a connectivity fabric requires a new paradigm, or a new range of forms of connectivity, said Brenner: "How [can] we have the wireless industry, which has such a short-term planning horizon, be so far-seeing to work on the right kind of technological solutions in industries we honestly know very, very little about?" Brenner said 4G LTE provides a strong foundation for IoT, and also spoke on the development of 5G technologies. "5G is going to be optimized for IoT from the very beginning," he said. "One of the main drivers of 5G is the idea of the need to support a massive number of devices using different ranges of connectivity. There is a lot of work going on with 5G. It will use both licensed spectrum and unlicensed spectrum, [as well as] shared spectrum."

Dean Garfield, Information Technology Industry Council CEO, said it isn't "the worst thing in the world" that Congress isn't moving ahead quickly on IoT policy. "There are other places that can advance this in a way that may be more flexible and adaptive that may then allow us to develop and identify where there are gaps and where regulations are appropriate," he said. "Rushing to regulation in the first instance is not the best approach." Joseph Lorenzo Hall, Center for Democracy and Technology chief technology officer, said it could be counterproductive to begin regulating IoT technology.

"On some level, rushing to do anything on the IoT space is kind of crazy from a regulatory perspective," Hall said. "[Having] the capacity to understand how this stuff works and the capacity to even make rational decisions about the implications of this stuff in a few years is really hard to do." Chris Boyer, AT&T assistant vice president-global public policy, said an effort is underway to create internationally based standards, but he isn't sure if that method is appropriate. "Is it even desirable to have a global standard?" he asked, saying he anticipates there will be quite a few IoT standards-setting bodies. Boyer compared where the IoT is now in its development process to where the Internet was in the 1990s.