The Cutting Edge: Tech Policy for the Modern Age.
How policy designed with interoperability in mind can revolutionize the global tech marketplace.
National Interests: A Catalyst
Throughout the history of the United States, there has been a consistent relationship developing between ever-expanding technologies and the country’s national interests. When this relationship is built upon, it tends to drastically expand the potential of the technology being used, which historically has prompted massive changes to the world in general. Sometimes these points of unification happening between policy and technology can be the byproduct of trying to improve the efficiency of a governmental process, while other times they can be a response to a foreign power’s utilization of new technology. The marriage between policy and technology carries an enormous capacity to catalyze the evolution of both.
The pattern of tech and policy unifying to create massive change is readily apparent in U.S. History. In the late 19th century Herman Hollerith used his experience working in the United States Census Office to invent the electric tabulating machine. Hollerith’s machine reduced the length of the Census from eight years to six, earning his company exclusive contract with the Census Bureau. His machines and business would later go on to become critical foundations for the starting of one of the titans of technology, the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). In 1957, Sputnik flying over the United States caused a national panic. The response to the concerns of the public was a shift in national policy that triggered the creation of NASA, and in turn, started the space race between the United States and the U.S.S.R. Before the end of the 1960s, the United States had won the space race by putting astronauts on the Moon and energized a new era of leadership in space research and technology. In the late 1960s, the U.S. Department of Defense created the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network to perform packet switching between computers across a network. This basic system would eventually lead to multiple computers being connected at different research institutions in the United States, and in turn, the creation of the modern internet. When technology and policy are aligned, the United States drives rapid growth which leads to improvements across industries.
With that in mind, the United States must continue with this methodology when creating policy proposals for new technology systems that intend on preventing wide-scale market fragmentation problems down the road. The technology ecosystem has changed rapidly in the last decade with 5G wireless network infrastructure, the internet of things, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and augmented/virtual reality all becoming significantly more relevant and exciting tools. A strong pathway for reducing the disparate nature of growing technology is building interoperability into the policy.
Enshrining interoperability into tech-focused policy will build critical foundations for the United States to maintain strong leadership in the evolution of technology in the global framework.
According to Merriam-Webster, Interoperability is, “the ability of a system (such as a weapons system) to work with or use the parts or equipment of another system.” The cohesion found in interoperability carries long-term positive benefits for rapidly improving new tech. With this in mind, the ideal representation of the next stage of the Internet’s evolution is to have inherent interoperability for new technologies and devices. This would create a seamless internet that intrinsically reduces the latency between new connections as they are added. To see how this policy could be implemented though, it’s worth looking at the recent and current policy landscapes.
Current Policy in Perspective
In the 116th Congress (2018–2020), two major pieces of legislation that focused on the comprehension and regulation of burgeoning tech domains were signed into law. The first of these was H.R. 1668, the Internet of Things Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2020, and the second was S. 893, the Secure 5G and Beyond Act of 2020. The former focused primarily on Congressional perspectives on IoT technology and the latter on the complex steps needed to successfully roll out wide-scale domestic and international 5G network infrastructures.
The IoT Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2020 defined the relationship between the Federal Government, responsible agencies, industry, and academia in collaboratively building strong IoT cybersecurity frameworks. These efforts focus heavily on detecting and managing cybersecurity vulnerabilities in Internet of Things devices, especially through the lens of configuration and identity management, secure development, and patching. The legislation also outlined the process for Internet of Things standards and guidelines creation, which is in the earliest stages of development with the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST). NIST’s draft guidelines establish clear pathways for implementation, security, and future uses cases beyond the Federal Government. The outcome of this policy is inherently aligned with interoperability as the guidelines help establish standardized frameworks for secure governmental applications.
In a similar vein, the Secure 5G and Beyond Act of 2020 was built around four major lines of effort: scaling 5G domestic rollout, assessing intrinsic security risks both domestically and internationally, and contributing to responsible global 5G development. These components evolved into the National Strategy to Secure 5G Implementation Plan, which more explicitly lays out the long-term strategy for the United States in leading the 5G network development and deployment process. There is a strong focus throughout the Implementation Plan on facilitating strong and secure relationships with private sector partners, especially as 5G rollout transitions from primarily domestic implementation to international expansion. While the focus of this policy isn’t inherently building interoperability, the strong national security angle provides an opportunity for the 5G standardization to occur domestically before wide-scale international deployments, which could provide similar outcomes. These policies and plans share commonalities between cybersecurity, domestic implementation of technology, and spearheading the global integration of tech. With the footing that existent policy provides, it’s worth examining policy under debate.
Federal Policy in the Works
Currently, the 117th Congress (2020–2022) is deliberating H.R. 981, the Internet of Things Readiness Act of 2021. This legislation carries 4 major premises:
- Internet of Things device usage is a critical component of the United States economy;
- Internet of Things device usage will continue to grow exponentially, and United States infrastructure needs to be prepared for that growth;
- In order for the Federal Government to properly address spectrum requirements, Congress needs to understand the full scope of future spectrum demand; and
- The United States should further prepare its infrastructure with comprehensive spectrum planning.
This legislation carries the purpose of identifying the amount of electromagnetic spectrum usage 5G and IoT devices will have on mobile networks and what adaptability will be needed down the road to meet the demand that the marketplace will have. With how quickly IoT and 5G adoption can flex demand against the market, this adaptability is key. Currently, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has only allocated band usage from 225 MHz to 7.125 GHz, but that could expand soon with the combined onset of 5G and IoT. The policy retains necessary flexibility by being built around the concept that spectrum usage growth will likely eclipse current system limitations. This flexibility in standardization coming from the government side is key in building long-term interoperable policy.
Think Tanks and Global Efforts
The Federal Government’s efforts have built the necessary infrastructure required to properly assess and standardize large sections of the tech solution marketplace. While domestic rollout, security, and global scaling are important, they only cover the beginning of the regulatory capacity. Think tanks like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Internet Society have laid out strong proposals for how to approach the next stage of interoperability. The European Union has also prioritized tech connectivity by creating frameworks on interoperability for the Internet of Things.
In the EFF’s Legislative Path to an Interoperable Internet, the approach is broken into two components: first, establishing the market floor by mandating access to monopolist platforms, and second, unlocking competitive compatibility to remove the market ceiling. Establishing the market floor comes with significant requirements, such as standardizing data portability, building back-end interoperability, and establishing a legal standard allowing delegability, the third-party delegation of service. These recommendations come with the important warning to not undermine data privacy and security efforts through interoperability implementation, and that doing so could be counter-effective to the holistic benefit.
Some of the key points in the EFF’s Legislative Path are mirrored in the Internet Society’s Report on Networks, Stability & Interoperability. They advocate strongly for working towards open standardization for ubiquitous connectivity, which will have large down the road benefits for cross-sectional applications like the Internet of Things on 5G networks. They share the concern that major market players and monopolists will attempt to create de facto market standards and that true open internet standards are a much better pathway for all players. Furthermore, they identify that with the rapid pace of innovation in the market today, standardization needs to be dynamic and evolve with the technology marketplace. These perspectives come with the understanding that the internet is evolving away from end-to-end connectivity, and rapidly shifting towards edge computing.
Understanding these concerns has allowed researchers to establish the first steps towards building an interoperable internet. In the European Union, a team of researchers developed a dual-use framework that incorporates technical designs for protocols, interfaces, and algorithms as well as an architectural model for interoperability. This team created the Internet of Things Architecture (IoT-A) project, which helped establish commonalities in edge computing design and manufacturers. Removing the communication barriers existent in the fragmented system is a critical step in building global interoperability, and establishing regional standardization across the European Union is an excellent step in this direction.
Unifying Ideas
Federal policy for burgeoning technology markets is currently focused primarily on development, security, and deployment. While this focus is important, there is a serious risk of slow regulatory efforts implicitly causing further market fragmentation due to the high evolution rate of technology, the rapid expansion of the marketplace, and the lack of ubiquitous standards. With this in mind, building interoperability into policy could heavily limit this effect and would be listening to the shared recommendations of think tanks as well as following the positive example set by our allies in the EU. To recap from earlier:
Enshrining interoperability into tech-focused policy will build critical foundations for the United States to maintain strong leadership in the evolution of technology in the global framework.
The United States has an excellent opportunity to engage the technology marketplace with the intent of heralding in a new era of connectivity and interoperability, and doing so would mirror the centuries of history that show when U.S. national interests and technology align, the results change the world.
