Obama and McCain Surrogates Describe Two Very Different Tech Presidents
BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, May 21 2008
I'm at the 18th annual Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference, being held at Yale this week, and this morning's opening session on "Presidential Technology Policy: Priorities for the Next Executive" featured representatives from the Obama and McCain campaigns. The Obama camp sent the co-director of MIT's decentralized information group. The McCain camp sent the former chief patent lawyer for Time Warner. The two seemed almost hand-picked as embodiments of the two very different ways a President Obama and a President McCain would handled tech policy.
(According to the moderator, the Clinton campaign was asked to send someone but declined.)
MIT professor Danny Weitzner came on the behalf of the Obama camp, and started the session by directing attention to the much-praised technology white paper that he helped to create, released months ago by the Obama campaign. Danny argued a real appreciation for the transformative power of the Internet is baked right in to the Obama campaign. By necessity, given that many old political hands and policy experts had already signed up by other campaigns, Obama reached far beyond traditional circles for expertise and organizing.
And that grassroots approach to building a presidential run, said Danny, gives the Obama approach to tech a certain "eat your own dog food" quality. And out of that has come strong stands in favor of using technologies to open up processes -- network neutrality, online free speech, increasing the diversity of media ownership, broadband rollout, and a proposed federal CTO whose job it would be to make sure agencies are sharing information.
Former Time Warner patent counsel and now McCain campaign special counsel Chuck Fish told the CFP crowd that the McCain camp's tech approach is driven by the idea that the job of the president is to make economic conditions ripe for innovation and then getting out of the way -- that the 1996 Telecom Act is some 750,000 words long, joked Chuck, is a sure sign that something is terribly wrong with the federal government's current approach.
And so, said Chuck, the McCain tech plan is aimed at "letting the market work": light regulation of business, including an overhaul of Sarbanes-Oxley; expanding the H1-B visa program; and making sure that the copyright and patent system provides "rewards great enough to compensate for the risk" of entrepreneurship.
The CFP crowd is, generally speaking, very technical with a strong historic government-wary streak. Tonight we're all getting together over dinner to craft a "Dear POTUS" letter, detailing what we want to see from the next occupant of the White House. I can't wait to see what we make out of the Obama and McCain's camps' very different ideas on what makes a great tech president.