The PDD provides clear direction for future use and management of GPS, ensuring the availability of GPS for consumers and promising a bright future for the GPS industry. The PDD paves the way to securing GPS as a global information technology standard. The U.S. will advocate the acceptance of GPS and it's augmentations as a standard for use by initiating international discussions and agreement with Japan and Europe. The factors that created a multi-billion dollar industry from the Internet, including the opening of advanced military technology to the private sector and its free, unlimited, worldwide availability, will do the same for GPS, said Gore. The PDD signals to the world a new era for GPS and fulfills the promise of the system which began development more than twenty-five years ago.
International customers can now make confident investment decisions in the technology.
This Presidential policy follows much debate on how, when and where GPS signals will be made available to the private sector. At the request of the OSTP, RAND Critical Technologies Institute conducted a comprehensive study to examine how the U.S. could effectively balance its national security and commercial interests in the system as well as identify and provide guidance for GPS management and development. Within the next decade, the Pentagon will review its practice of degrading the commercially available GPS signal. The military signal permits users to pinpoint their location within 20 meters or better, but the commercial signal is less accurate, determining location with accuracies of 100 meters. Using augmented GPS or differential GPS, some commercially available GPS products can pinpoint a location with an accuracy of 10 meters to 1 centimeter.