Paraphrasing a recent FCC report on the decline of local...

the conclusion “we should push for universal broadband to help online businesses thrive.” As more smartphones are in the hands of consumers, more industries are created that “we couldn’t have dreamed of a decade ago,” he said. Social media and media-sharing sites are examples, he said. More videos are uploaded to YouTube in 60 days than the average three major TV networks created in 60 years, he said. He mentioned Cisco data, forecasting that traffic for wireless devices will exceed that of wired devices by 2014. Calling spectrum “the lifeblood of innovation,” Shapiro said if the industry doesn’t get more allocation “we'll have the World Wide Wait for all of our wireless devices.” Shapiro said the U.S. has to resist what other companies are proposing in terms of Internet regulation. He recently participated in the EG8 Summit, where French president Nicolas Sarkozy issued a plea for nations “to regulate the Internet to preserve political values” and what Shapiro called “other protectionist purposes.” In France “you're not allowed to say Twitter or Facebook on radio or TV,” he maintained, urging protection of First Amendment rights. Shapiro expressed concern about the U.S. government asserting broad powers on websites “it doesn’t like with very little or no judicial process.” Whether the issue is child pornography or intellectual property, hundreds of businesses are pulled offline mistakenly because “when they shut down websites, they shut down a lot more than they intended,” Shapiro said. “We have to be very careful to protect businesses against our own government’s efforts to develop new powers that hurt innovation and send the wrong message to regimes abroad that use our technology to spread their pro-democracy messages.”