Chairman Verkuil: [0:01] Thank you. All right, so now we're open for further comments. I was going to call on the General Council of Commerce, Cameron Kelly, if he's - Kerry, I'm sorry, if he's up for that, because you might want to give the position on this and so forth. But you cannot speak until you get a microphone, which is coming because Gabby is moving in your direction. And if you'll just introduce yourself.

Cameron Kerry: [0:36] Yeah.

Chairman Verkuil: [0:37] Thank you.

Cameron F. Kerry: [0:37] Thank you, Paul. I'm Cameron Kerry, I'm the General Council of the Department of Commerce. The development of voluntary standards plays an increasing role in our work, certainly in the work that you have heard about by NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, formally the Bureau of Standards. [1:07] But increasingly in regulatory work as we move forward, the development of standards, using voluntary consensus standards, is a public/private partnership that works. It has worked for NIST in its development of standards, in the close work that it does with a great many standards-setting organizations.

[1:45] Increasingly, it plays an important role in work that we are doing in the innovation space dealing with the Internet, dealing with work forthcoming, on the Obama Administration's development of privacy policy, where we look to the model of standard setting to deal with the development of regulation in a way that can match Internet speed. So the role of standard-setting organizations is critical to that.

[2:45] Certainly, as we have gone through the work of developing a multi-stakeholder process for privacy policy, one of the comments that we've heard from a great many civil society organizations, consumer organizations, others, is the concern about their capacity, their resources to participate in the process. So the ability of standard-setting organizations to fund their participation is critical to this process.

[3:22] As John Cooney said, "Information wants to be free, but often, information is not free." And one of the challenges of our information system is to create mechanisms for the payment of information. So the work that has been done on these recommendations strike an appropriate balance that does not kill the golden goose but makes important steps to encourage transparency in this area.

[4:09] I oppose the Strauss Amendment because I think that ultimately as it has ended up, represents a step backward from that. I appreciate the efforts that Professor Strauss made to deal with the funding of standards-setting organizations, and to enable preserving a fee-setting model for that information.

[4:50] But what is left does not, I think, avoid the problem altogether by not expressly acknowledging that payment may be called for by, as Professor Strauss put it, attempting to bury the issue. I think it is a move away from the transparency that the work of this committee has encouraged that critical objective here. So I would move that we table the amendment and adopt the proposal as recommended.