Two years ago, my colleagues and I here at the Baker Institute published policy documents for the Obama administration’s transition team. As we approach the 2010 mid-term elections, it makes sense to look at those recommendations and compare them to what appear to be the salient issues and priorities for the Obama administration as well as its critics. Not all of what mattered in the autumn of 2008 appears a priority today, and despite the most earnest attempts by some in the futures game, a crystal ball for prescient political forecasting has yet to be invented. However, it is still useful to take a backward look from time-to-time to see what possible paths were charted and how the one chosen coincides with them.
In late 2008, the United States appeared perched at the edge of an economic abyss. With its banking system shattered, millions of jobs disappearing, spiked energy prices and rising budget deficit numbers, commenting on the nation’s IT policy probably appeared to border on the irrelevant. But in 2008, as in 2010, IT was hardly irrelevant. As the Organisation for Economic Development and Co-operation observed in 2008, one half of the world’s venture capital investment was directed at investments in information and computing technologies. Why? Information and computing services, despite the collapse of the dot com bubble in 2000-2001, still represent an avenue for enhanced earnings, largely through increased productivity. When we think about good jobs, they tend to be technical ones, whether in health care, energy or other economic sectors. IT matters.
While I asked the incoming Obama team to consider many items, from the creation of a federal chief technology officer position and funding for more broadband network deployment to enhanced diplomatic engagement, increased cybersecurity and additional resources for the sustainment of Moore’s Law, the rough doubling of computer processing power every 18-24 months. But today, when we think about Obama and IT, one policy statement stands above all others: Net Neutrality. It is a term that means many things to many people, but the President, speaking at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California on November 14, 2007 stated, “I will take a back seat to no one network neutrality,” and urged that the Internet remain widely open without privilege for certain applications or streams of content.
While Google appears to have moved on in its thoughts on Net Neutrality it remains as to whether the Administration has done the same. Google’s agreement with telecommunications giant Verizon is interesting, but also confusing. The joint declaration has additional critics decrying Google’s retrenchment on its corporate ideology regarding evil. But to the Silicon Valley ethos, evil is commoditized somewhat differently. Its way of thinking remains influenced by the politics of a declaration of independence widely quoted but increasingly of questionable long-term value. But we need to remember when John Perry Barlow, a retired cattle rancher and onetime lyricist of the Grateful Dead, wrote his declaration: 1996.
“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”
It was a wonderful year for the world of the Internet, when web masters, people whose primary competencies were posting of HTML pages to publicly available Internet addresses and producing perhaps enough code to collect some alphanumeric information into a database, earned salaries north of six figures. Times have changed.
Still chugging along, however, is Moore’s constant. Computer engineers have worried mightily that the continuous redoubling of computer power has been approaching its end for almost a decade. A Rice University graduate student, Jun Yao, contributed to research that may possibly “overcome a fundamental barrier to the continued rapid miniaturization of computer memory that has been the basis for the consumer electronics revolution.” So, yet again, R&D may get us out of a pinch.
But what of the Net Neutrality problem, what innovation will get us out of that pinch? What Net Neutrality advocates argue for is the prevention of censorship by those companies providing Internet connectivity. They argue that the phone or cable company will send their preferred content along quickly, but the competitor’s less so. The little guys of the Internet will disappear. The blogosphere will be silenced and rendered irrelevant. The Internet won’t be what it was in 1996.
And then I realize, it’s 2010. My mobile smart phone has approximately the same amount of computing power as the laptop I schlepped around in 2001 (and roughly four times the memory). I use the services and products of almost every major U.S. technology company – Microsoft, Apple, Google, HP, Oracle and IBM. Also, I use both the major Internet service providers in Houston – AT&T and Comcast, and I am considering bringing on a third, Sprint’s Clear Wireless service, just so I can have backup connectivity. Why not? As one of my colleagues in Rice’s electrical and computer engineering department opined, “It’s blazingly fast.”
So, I recommend the President worry about some other items for the moment. Our critical issue for this electoral season is jobs, and if regulation can stimulate job growth, then regulation we should have. But in the world of IT, regulation has typically had the contrary impact. It is time for President Obama to rethink his Net Neutrality stance. Google certainly has done it.
Christopher Bronk is the Baker Institute fellow in technology, society and public policy. He previously served as a career diplomat with the United States Department of State on assignments both overseas and in Washington, D.C.