FCC CHAIRMAN JULIUS GENACHOWSKI REMARKS ON THE OPEN INTERNET APPS CHALLENGE COMMISSION MEETING ROOM WASHINGTON, DC AUGUST 5, 2011 Thank you for joining me to announce the winners of the Open Internet Apps Challenge. I’m thrilled to be here to see the results of your hard work. We announced this competition last December when the Commission adopted a light-touch framework to preserve a free and open Internet. It’s another important step in our agenda to empower consumers and promote innovation, investment and job creation. Thank you to our panel of judges who volunteered their time in evaluating the entries. This group includes professors from Boston University and UMass-Amherst; scientists and technologists from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Arbor Networks, and ICSI; and engineers from AT&T, Comcast, Microsoft, Raytheon and Intel. On my first day as Chairman, I spoke about the important principles of openness and transparency. We’ve been committed to improving the information we provide the public; opening the agency to greater participation from external stakeholders; and pursuing transparency as a vehicle to empower consumers. And we’ve been committed to harnessing technology to pursue these important principles of openness to transparency. In keeping this commitment, we’ve hosted more than 85 staff-led public workshops on topics from public safety to small business opportunities, workshops that have been streamed online and open to broad public participation. We transformed our website, offering new ways for public participation, including an easy-to-use proceedings page where people can submit comments into the official public record with just one click – a first in government. We are the first federal agency to launch a website that makes government data available in formats that can help entrepreneurs build innovative applications. We've also worked extensively with the software developer community. The FCC held an Open Developer Day, also a first. And this challenge presents a new opportunity for the agency to partner with innovators and researchers working towards important goals. One of the most innovative ways the Commission is promoting public participation is through challenge.gov. Challenge.gov is a government-wide initiative which offers a platform for agencies to solicit the public’s best ideas to solve public challenges. Agencies submit a challenge, and private citizens propose solutions -- often with prizes as an incentive for their submissions. Late last year, the FCC issued a new challenge to researchers, inventors, and software developers: create tools and publish research that would help preserve and protect a free and open Internet. This challenge was designed to provide the public, researchers, policy makers, consumers and the Internet community with useful tools and information that will help ensure the free flow of information on the Internet – data that help consumers make informed choices in choosing broadband service, and help developers designing the next killer app. This challenge was announced at the same time the Commission adopted a strong and balanced framework to preserve Internet freedom. This framework – which has been broadly supported – is working. We said at the time that this strong and balanced framework would bring increased certainty and predictability to a long fraught issue. And it has. We said that it would help spur innovation and investment throughout the broadband economy. And it has. Tens of billions of new dollars have already been invested this year in fixed and mobile broadband networks this year – an increase in private investment in this sector, even in this challenging economy. Shortly after the framework was adopted, America’s leading wireless providers announced that they were accelerating the deployment of their 4G networks. We’ve seen increased investment not only in the core of the network, but also at the edge. In fact, there is more investment this year in U.S. Internet companies than in any year since 2001. Investments in Internet companies – these are companies that rely on a free and open Internet -- surged in the second quarter of this year with $2.3 billion going into 275 companies. This represents a 72% increase in dollars and a 46% increase in deals from the first quarter of this year. 2011 is going to be the biggest year for tech IPOs in more than a decade, reflecting strong investor confidence in companies that rely on an open Internet. These companies, meanwhile, are creating thousands and thousands of new jobs. Consider: Groupon and LivingSocial, two very young Internet companies with services providing benefits to both consumers and small businesses, have created over 10,000 jobs in the last two years. We’re seeing more and more evidence that the broadband sector is a bright light in our economy – and is strongly positioned to help drive and strengthen our economy. Just yesterday, I was in Indiana participating in the announcement of 100,000 new broadband- enabled jobs. A coalition of leading customer service companies have committed to creating these jobs over the next two years. These will include many jobs on-shored from overseas. And many “at home” jobs which provide unique opportunities for people who need to work from home, including people with disabilities, returning veterans, and single parents. This brings me back to the challenge and why the winners of this contest will help ensure continued certainty, innovation and investment in this vital sector. How? Shining a light on network management practices will ensure that incentives for entrepreneurs and innovators remain strong. They will help deter improper conduct – helping ensure that consumers and the marketplace pick winners and losers online, and that websites or applications aren’t improperly blocked or slowed. Today, we recognize three teams who rose to the challenge. Our award for Best App – the winner of both the juried competition and the public voting - goes to a team from the University of Michigan and Microsoft research, which created MobiPerf, an Android and iOs app. With this tool, in only two minutes, you can give your mobile broadband network a thorough check-up. MobiPerf will not only give you basic information about your service, such as throughput speeds, but it can also reveal traffic management practices – such as the blocking of certain ports and applications. We have two winners for Best Research. A team at Georgia Tech’s School of Computer Science developed a method called “Differential Probing” or DiffProbe, which allows end-users and researchers to identify the ways ISPs shape Internet traffic on their networks. ISCIS, the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley, came up with a tool called Netalyzr, a Java applet, which like MobiPerf allows people to conduct a diagnostic of their Internet service. Their paper looks at more than 130,000 measurement sessions to understand filtering and manipulation practices being employed by broadband providers. MobiPerf, DiffProbe, and Netalyzr may sound like experimental pharmaceuticals, but these are practical tools that are giving consumers and researchers the information they need to understand and monitor the free and open Internet. It’s my pleasure to recognize these private citizens whose innovations will ensure the Internet remains a powerful platform for innovation, job creation, and free expression. I’d now like to call up the winning team members to accept your awards: Feng Quian (Fang Can) of the University of Michigan Team; Nicholas Weaver of the ISCI Team; and from the Georgia Tech Team, Partha Kanuparthy and Constantine Dovrolis. With that, it’s now my pleasure to welcome the University of Michigan and Microsoft team, who will offer a presentation of MobiPerf, followed by presentations from the other winners.