The cover of the CES 2012 Daily, featuring details of Wednesday’s interview of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski by Consumer Electronic Association president Gary Shapiro, and that of Ericsson president/CEO Hans Vestberg’s keynote the same day sums up things nicely.
The first headline: “FCC’s Genachowski: ‘We Need Incentive Auction Law, Now;’ the second: “Ericsson’s Vestberg: Networked Society Not Far Away.”
If only.
FCC Chairman Genachowski, in his third CES, noted that the FCC has been sounding the alarm about the spectrum crunch for three years. He warned of not only slower speeds and higher prices for mobile broadband, but also that “’if we don’t create innovation zones based on massive broadband in the U.S, other countries surely will,’ and that capital and jobs will flow in that direction.”
Exactly. CES Daily’s lead story about the FCC chairman’s walking tour of the sprawling show floor captured his impressions that “the show presented more than 3,000 companies, with virtually every product on the floor fueled by wired and wireless broadband Internet.”
One such company is Ericsson, and in his keynote, president/CEO Vestberg said that “[a]nything that benefits from being connected will be connected in the future.”
What is not assured, however, is that this future happens here, in the U.S. The 3,000 exhibitor companies on the show floor, and the companies eager to to buy their products - and all the potential jobs created by these innovations – can just as easily as not go to another country willing to make this networked society a reality.
