Realizing the Promise of the Digital Revolution

Let's talk about your proposal with Newton Minow for the "digital promise." At one level, you're harkening back to American history, which is to say that at critical turning points, we have found a way to fund a public resource. Tell us a little about that history and what your idea is.

It's a very interesting and quite wonderful finding in what we did. The first concern was here we have all of these magical -- and I really mean they're magical, we're just beginning to see what they're about -- new telecommunication devices in the digital world. You have the Internet that reaches the globe. It's now basically text, but more and more getting to be an opportunity to put pictures [out] as well as words, and sound. And the television set, when it all goes digital, will become much more like the computer, just as the computer is becoming much more like the television set. You can have interactive programming and curricula courses. So it's got great potential for education, wonderful potential for lifelong learning, for job training. It's got great potential to take the DNA of our civilization, which libraries and museums and universities have, and get them outside their walls and into the home and into the workplace and into the school. But nobody's addressing those issues. We are spending billions of dollars in hardware to connect schools to the Internet, but nobody is spending any money on content.

In looking at this, a bunch of foundations asked former FCC Chairman Newton Minow and me if we would make some recommendations about how to deal with the public interest needs and how to fill that potential. In doing our report we realized that there's a great precedent in this country. Public education was begun back in the eighteenth century -- 1787 -- when one of the first acts of the new country, through the Congress, was to provide frontier land to the new states, so that they would be able to use the revenue from that land for public education, because there was a passionate belief among our founding fathers, and a need in the democracy, to educate the public. It was the first time in the history of world there was anything like that.

In the middle of the Civil War, in the nineteenth century, in the darkest days of the Civil War, Congress passed, and President Lincoln signed, the Land Grant Colleges Act, which provided for public higher education for the first time in history. They said, "We'll take the unused, the frontier land, the publicly-owned land, give it to every state, as long as the states will build public colleges and universities to teach farmers to do better farming and workers to do better industry. They can use the revenue for the contents -- for the textbooks and for the cost of the schools, of public higher education." And then, of course, in the twentieth century, we had the GI Bill.

We are saying that it's now time in the twenty-first century for a similar major initiative with these new telecommunications and digital technologies coming in the Knowledge Age. The spectrum, the electromagnetic waves that bring you that radio and television in the old days' stations, the spectrum has become increasingly valuable. And that publicly-owned spectrum, because it is owned by the public, is today's equivalent of the public land of the previous centuries.

So let's use as least some of the revenues from auctioning off unused portions of the spectrum, which Congress has ordered the FCC to do, which will bring in billions of dollars, let's set aside the money that we're getting from the spectrum to provide for our educational needs for the future, and as we did with public land in the previous centuries. There's a precedent in this country for that. And there's a need in this country for figuring out new ways to transform our education at every level, from the youngest kindergarten and preschool, all the way up to senior citizens, as our population grows older. We have the technologies now that will enable us to do that. The question is, how do we get people to develop the models and the prototypes and the simulations and the dramatic new ways to transform our educational processes? But not only that, to provide civic information, and to serve our libraries and museums and our performing art societies, so our arts and culture can benefit from these new models? To provide a kind of a fund to bring them all into the digital age?

What we are proposing with the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust -- DO IT -- and, by the way, it's available online at digitalpromise.org, so that everybody can see it -- is the idea of having this country set aside for future generations billions of dollars -- they're saying $18 billion -- from the auctioning of the public spectrum. Take that money, and that will enable us to spend a billion dollars a year transforming education, doing for education what the National Science Foundation does for science, what the National Institutes of Health do for health, what DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, does for our military. We have nothing like that in education. The recent Presidential Commission, for example, found that of all the money that we spend on education, we spend less than one-tenth of one percent on research and development. High-tech industries spend 10 to 20 percent. The computer chip industry spends 15 to 20 percent on research and development. The potato chip industry spends 3 percent, on potato chip development research -- we spend less than a tenth of one percent on education! And what is more important in this information age than transforming our educational system?

Now, a devil's advocate would say, "Well, couldn't this better be done by the private sector?"

That's where I go back to the conversation we had about the separation of the marketplace responsibility and the public responsibility. There are certain things, and some types of education are among them, that can be done by the private sector -- there's a lot of stuff being done in terms of business schools -- but it's driven by what can make money. It's very hard to figure out how to make money serving our kindergarten through twelfth grade needs. It's very difficult to figure out how to make money providing free political time for candidates and for civic information about valid referenda and initiatives. It's very hard to figure out how to make money dealing with the needs of our arts and cultural institutions. The marketplace is doing a fine job on the business side. But there's this big gap, and that's where the public investment is needed.

One of the critiques that could be made of public institutions generally, and maybe even of PBS in efforts like this, is the bureaucratization that sets in. How can we establish this trust and avoid that?

That's a very good point, and a very important question. The trust will focus on content. The trust, like, let's say, the DARPA, which was the Defense Department's research and development, will comprise a very few people, who know the field, who move in and out, so that they're not permanent employees, and who can make judgments based on the best applications, the best ideas that there are. They will not do it themselves, they will fund it through contracts and through grants. One of the proposals is to put this in an existing organization or in a comparable institution like the National Science Foundation, which has experience, has a great record, has a high reputation for not being political, so that it doesn't develop huge bureaucracies. Public television spends more money on overhead and institutions than on programming, and that's one of the real problems.

When public television goes digital, as all television stations are required to do, they reach into every home in the country. There's an opportunity to redefine it and rethink it, so that it becomes a carrying vehicle for our museums and our libraries and our universities, also to reach into every home. And they also help the Internet to reach into homes. But we've got to help provide what goes into those networks.

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