Daily Digest: The "Obama Internet" Moment?

• The "Obama Internet" Moment?: The New York Times editorial board is urging President-elect Obama to embrace the idea that restoring the U.S.'s rightful place at the vanguard of the Internet could be a centerpiece of his presidential legacy. Obama is unlikely to disagree with the premise, but this quote from Free Press's Ben Scott -- "This is the Eisenhower Interstate highway moment for the Internet" -- gets at a point of contention in conservative and libertarian circles, where the idea that the Internet should be akin to the federally-funded, municipally-run interstate system is far from a widely-accepted notion.

• Presidential Inauguration Donors, Unmasked: Anyone kicking in coin to the Presidential Inauguration Committee is finding themselves included in a searchable and sortable online database. Team Obama is refusing donations from lobbyists, PACS, corporations, and foreign interests, and individuals are limited to $50,000 -- unless you're a "bundler," where the limit is $300,000. Poking around the nascent database, it turns out that just under 170 people have already maxed out personal donations. As of today, ten bundlers (including friend-of-Obama Penny Pritzker) have hit the ceiling. Revealing heretofore secret inauguration donations and embracing a higher level of transparency than any past inaugural is worthy of hearty applause. What would be extra nice: make the data easily exportable, so that anyone interested can play with it to their hearts' content.

• "Open for Questions" Returns Cut-and-Paste Answers: As the Nation's Ari Melber reports, the transition team has posted responses to the top five queries that came out of its "Open for Questions" feature. More than 20,000 people voted about a million times on 10,000 questions throughout the transparent process, and, as Melber notes, "the leading queries focused on marijuana legalization, restoring Constitutional protections, avoiding waste in the financial bailout, Stem Cell research and education." Sure, the whole exercise was innovatively open-book, but to what end? The answers returned by the team are cut-and-paste policyspeak. A question on making stem cell research a policy priority in the first 100 days got a vague 23-word affirmation of the research in general. And it took just eleven words for the team to say a polite but firm "no" to legalizing marijuana.

• Bush Posts Huge Numbers, Though Not the Kind He'd Like: Making note of the fact that the many video copies of the Bush shoe incident in Iraq popping around the Internet have been watched more than 5.5 million times, TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld asks "[i]s that how Bush will be remembered?" (Thanks Shaun Dakin) Perhaps. But at least the 43rd President can rest assured that, if so, he'll be remembered in part for displaying some remarkable reflexes. For a 62 year-old man, he moves with the agile grace of a cat.

• In a Word, "No": Such was the boiled-down response of Obama transition spokesperson Nick Shapiro when asked by Talking Points Memo's Greg Sargent about whether the President-elect has shifted his stand on network neutrality. Sargent was asking because a controversial article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal suggested the President-elect was starting to go a bit soft on neutrality. But, to get down into the weeds for a moment, all Obama is doing here is reaffirming his past stand on neutrality. And, sure, that position has him firmly against the idea that telephone and cable companies can privilege content in any way. But his take on whether the subject of that article -- Google's efforts at improving service provisioning -- violates neutrality isn't quite black and white.

• Marriage Equality + BarCamp = ...: Continuing the trend of left-leaning political geeks successfully co-opting organizing models from actual geek geeks (see RootsCamp) is EqualityCamp, a reaction to Prop 8's passage in California to be held in San Francisco on January 3rd. EqualityCamp is happening with a great deal of support from the Courage Campaign, whose new plan for online-driven organizing for LGBT rights we've profiled on Personal Democracy Forum.

In Case You Missed It...

Taking a look at the Washington Post's Al Kamen's recent fun at the expense of ground-breaking Twittering diplomat Colleen Graffy, Matthew Burton details how "political commentators can destroy our e-democracy dreams."