Competitive Enterprise Institute Launches Program to Advance Innovation in Telecommunications

Washington, D.C., June 1, 2012 – Today, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) launched the Communications Liberty and Innovation Project (CLIP), a program of CEI’s Center for Technology and Innovation.

The Communications Liberty and Innovation Project will focus on advancing market solutions to the communications policy challenges of the digital age. The program will be directed by Fred Campbell, the former chief of the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau of the FCC and immediate past president of the Wireless Communications Association International.

CLIP will act as a counterweight to groups who advocate increased regulation of the telecommunications sector. The project will offer substantive commentary, criticism and policy proposals on timely communications and Internet policy issues, such as mobile Internet, Internet governance, and broadband.

CEI launched CLIP to bring balance to the communications and technology policy arena. Discussions of communications and Internet policy in Washington have for too long centered primarily on the supposed need for more government regulation of the Internet.

To counter this push for more central planning, CLIP will advocate free market, pro-consumer solutions for telecommunications policy issues. Ultimately, the goal of CLIP is to unleash the ingenuity and creative spirit of America’s high-tech entrepreneurs. The economic and social progress of the global community depends upon the freedom of inventors to innovate without cumbersome boundaries, and CLIP will seek to preserve and promote that freedom.

“Fred Campbell’s experience and advocacy of free markets makes him an exceptional collaborator with CEI,” said Wayne Crews, Director of CEI’s Center for Technology and Innovation. “We look forward to CLIP bringing an influential voice for positive change to some of the most important policy discussions facing the future of prosperity in America.”

Additional information, blog posts and commentary about CLIP can be found on the Communications Liberty and Innovation Project’s website, DriveInnovation.org, or on CEI’s website, www.cei.org.