It's even received extra attention yesterday with the release and added emphasis on Barack Obama's technology policy. Amongst the various topics we've talked about here at Mashable, other featured pieces to the technology plank of Obama's platform include doubling basic research funding, making research and development tax rebates permanent, immigration reform and increased governmental transparency.
Interestingly, most of these promises are supported by both candidates. Republicans are traditionally for any tax cuts they can get their hands on, Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin has been calling for increased governmental transparency (which interestingly was met by criticisms from Obama surrogates saying the junior senator's existing measures were good enough).
The key issues where the candidates differ are on how anti-trust laws are enforced and crafted and on the issue of nationalized broadband. All of these issues are somehow wrapped in the cloak of a national Chief Technology Officer (CTO). We talked about this issue in overview a couple of weeks ago here at Mashable, but I thought I'd take a deeper look at the issue on the eve of the election, since I haven't seen a plain-English dissection of this issue anywhere this season.
First, the final word on the idea of a national CTO.
Many readers and commenters have some very idyllic ideas as to what the CTO should do or is intended to do. The most common theory is that the national CTO will be a fundraising cheerleader for government led technology initiatives which need attention, as Mashable reader Joe Hall said last time around.
I understand the concept of a fundraising cheerleader. My point is that we don’t need to raise funds for a nationalized broadband infrastructure. Last time we did something like that was the Universal Service Fund. We raised $50 billion through those efforts and nothing measurable was accomplished, because ultimately it’s up to the telcos to accomplish, and they've proven they can’t be trusted to follow through.
One of the other theories is that the CTO is simply a position for a cabinet level advisor for the president. The individual will presumably be more technology savvy than the president, and thus be much more qualified to provide valid directions for the executive branch to take in their technology decisions.
Of course, if you look at the position the way I originally envisioned it when it was suggested, the case against the position becomes almost overwhelming:
So we’re starting out with a nebulous position, and we’re putting it in charge of interpreting the nations’ technology issues, and hoping that the government won’t abuse the advice to expand their own power and use it to drum up votes.
Do you think we’ll see the end of exploitation of Craigslist as a political punching bag anytime theirs a prostitution bust with a CTO? Do you think we’ll see an end to Attorney Generals using pedophilia online as a way to scare the public and major corporations into playing ball?
No, of course not, they’ll just have more advanced terminology to play with. Semantic web technology will be used to scare the electorate into outlawing the technology so we won’t have a Will Smith I, Robot situation on our hands. Better understanding of how trojans and worms are spread will only encourage congress to pass a law requiring mandatory keyloggers on every citizen’s computer.
If they get really altruistic and industrious, they might just get interested in protecting our privacy. Of course, to them that’ll mean that every blogger will be required to obtain a license to operate a webserver so they can regulate how data is collected - data handling procedures that will tell you how you treat personal data entered in comments, cookies left by your ads, and disclosure of your sources.
Nationalized Broadband and the Lessons from East Asia
One of the interesting comparisons that keeps getting brought up is the rapid growth of the telecoms in South Korea and Japan during the 1990s, and what role their respective governments played in that growth. It tends to be brought up in the comments here at Mashable as an argument for both sides - some folks will say that the runaway growth is due to the governments' hands-off approach, while others will say that it's a direct result of governmental intervention and direction of the growth of the telecom sector.
The truth is somewhere in between. It's hard to find many resources that directly touch on this bit of technological history that don't have partisan influence in their authoring, but I was able to find a research paper from Berkeley University that had a veritable treasure trove of details that provided historical perspective dating back to the 1800s. Anyone with a few hours to kill ought to check it out, but those of us interested in the parts pertinent to what we should do in America to get our broadband up to international snuff (so to speak), might be more interested in these factoids I gleaned from the paper:
In the one year between 1999 and 2001, the number of DSL subscriptions in Korea rose from 97 thousand to 2.7 million
In that same year, cable modem subscriptions increased from 17 thousand to 1.5 million.
The rates of growth that were experienced in Japan as well as South Korea were due to governmental de-regulation.
In Japan, the telecom was handled and regulated by the same division of government responsible for postal regulations (sound familiar?). Once that restriction was eliminated, the roadblocks were cleared for rapid growth.
In South Korea, similar governmental roadblocks were cleared, mostly having to due with censorship.
In both cases, demand and centralized population centers were the biggest driving factors behind adoption.
Only after rapid growth and clear dominance by a few private broadband providers had been established did the government step back in and exert a heavier hand in how the markets were regulated.
Which is better: bad tech policy or no tech policy?
What does that mean in terms of what we should do for America? Well, the idea that we should regulate our way to better competition and more innovation continues to be an idea that doesn't bear scrutiny. As we talked about last time around, all attempts in the past by the government to subsidize or regulate a way to wider telecom infrastructure adoption have ended in miserable failure in America or abroad.
Instead of attributing these positive moves in the US to market competition (which admittedly did play some part), it's probably more accurate to ask why this hasn't happened much sooner, since the average home connection in East Asia has been priced what an AOL dialup account costs while reaching speeds only now being achieved.
The answer lies in that the USA has has such a cozy relationship with the telcos and cable companies, providing subsidy and endorsement of their business model that the incentive for them to grow and innovate simply doesn't exist.
Rather than focusing on anti-trust and and subsidies, as Barack Obama intends to do, what would be better would be focusing on creating an environment where corporate taxes were lowered, and other tax incentives were emphasized for start-ups who focus on better information infrastructure. Senator McCain's tax plan is moderately favorable towards this theory, though it is likely simply a coincidence convenient to this argument rather than a well thought out technology policy.
When it comes to the basics, both presidential candidates are generally on the right track, and are generally in agreement as well. I've outlined above where they differ, though, and I think history has shown that Barack Obama's desired policy directions would be more detrimental to innovation and growth for the tech sector.