May 2012

While the cyber threat remains one of the most serious challenges we face as a nation, we have made some tremendous progress recently working together with industry on meaningful ways to secure our nation’s critical infrastructure.

Earlier this month, we gave the green light to two long-awaited Defense Industrial Base (DIB) efforts designed to help companies protect critical information related to Department of Defense programs and missions. The DIB Cybersecurity/Information Assurance (CS/IA) program allows eligible DIB companies and the Government to share cybersecurity information. The Government shares cybersecurity threat and mitigation information with DIB companies to incorporate into their security practices, and, in turn, DIB companies report known intrusion events that may compromise DOD information to the Government and participates in damage assessments as needed. In addition, DIB enhanced Cybersecurity Services -- a joint DOD-DHS activity and based on lessons learned from the 2011 DIB Pilot -- is available as an optional part of the DIB CS/IA program in which the Government will furnish classified information that enables DIB companies or participating commercial service providers to counter additional types of known malicious activity for participating DIB companies. This week, I will be sitting down with senior industry executives to discuss the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace and the value in becoming “relying parties” that would accept these credentials, giving up passwords for stronger and easier to use technologies. Next Thursday, Deputy Secretary of Energy Dan Poneman and senior officials from DHS and industry will join me to conclude the Electric Sector Cybersecurity Capability Maturity Model initiative. This initiative has shown promising results as a common tool to evaluate and strengthen cybersecurity capabilities and enable utilities to prioritize actions and cybersecurity investments. I look forward to discussing this exciting initiative this week.

When we built Gmail, we wanted to bring that same great search experience Google is known for to email. And today, we are making that experience even better by improving the autocomplete predictions you see when you search in Gmail. Now when you type something into the Gmail search box, the autocomplete predictions will be tailored to the content in your email, so you can save time and get the information you want faster than ever before. For example, you might now get lax reservation or lax united as predictions after typing "lax" if you have received an email with a flight confirmation for your trip to Los Angeles in your inbox recently. We will be rolling out improved autocomplete in English over the next few days and will follow with more languages over the next few months. While initially improved autocomplete will not be available for Google Apps customers, we plan to bring this feature to Apps domains in the future.

[Commentary] Many articles are touting the failure of the Facebook IPO. The company went public at $38 a share and traded up, settling back down at slightly over the IPO price. I don't think I would call that unsuccessful. The next day of trading, Facebook slumped to $34 per share. It's tough to read early price action, but my trader instinct says it was an over-anticipated and over-hyped product. Retail investors could understand it, heard about it, could experience it and bought it. Once they were out of the market, there was no one left to buy it. But, I still think it's a successful initial public offering. Why do I think Facebook was a success? What is an initial public offering anyway? Why does a company do it? Thinking about that changes the one day metric of success or failure.

• First, the company was started in 2004, grew, and went public in 2012. Eight years to IPO with an uphill environment of bad economy and bad regulations that were huge impediments to them. Since 90 percent of digital companies fail, just surviving was great. Of all the companies that start up, most are acquired. Facebook actually becoming what they have become is pretty awesome when you look at the odds.
• Second, a company goes public to get capital for growth. In the analysis that takes place before the IPO day, the company and the investment bankers helping it have a lot of discussions about where to price. From the company perspective, they want the highest price possible. The investment bankers play both sides of the fence, wanting the highest price for the company, but they want to leave room for investors to make some money as well. That is what helps create the initial market.

[Commentary] The more things change, the more they stay the same. Try as we might to talk about new issues facing the Commission, the old challenges just keep coming back. In fact, they never go away. They may come in different wrappings and with new semantics, but they’re really not much different. It’s still all about protecting the public interest. In telecommunications, that means getting advanced communications out to all our citizens -- reasonably comparable services at reasonably comparable prices. From there, Congress made plain the need for consumer protections, competition among providers, and protecting the safety of the people. In media, and I’ll come back to this briefly later, it‘s still about promoting diversity, localism and competition and making sure people get the news and information they need to be fully-functioning citizens. These were the challenges of 1934 and 1996 and they remain the challenges of 2012. What’s changed, however, is that it’s so much more difficult to meet these challenges in 2012. To be sure, it was never a slam-dunk, but we have ourselves in a predicament now where we won’t overcome these challenges without some major changes. And making those changes is piled high with difficulty. Here’s my take on why this is so.