IP Democracy: Criteria for a TechPresident

The Personal Democracy Forum held its big annual conference last week (The LA Times’ Scott Martelle has a recap here, Information Week’s K.C. Jones has a good summary here and the PdF itself has a convenient Technorati search of blog postings here) and the event was noteworthy for three things.

First, based on blog reports and press accounts, PdF drew well over 750 attendees, more than double any other event it has hosted. Secondly, and perhaps related, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was one of the keynoters, interviewed by the NYT’s Thomas Friedman, no less. That’s not surprising given that Google probably ponied up a pretty penny in sponsorship money — the title of the event was “Personal Democracy Forum - Sponsored by Google.” The search giant managed to get its name in the conference name and clearly Google wants to generate luster as a potent power in online politics.

Most interestingly to me, however, is a manifesto of sorts issued by PdF founders Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry that spells out what the country needs in its first “TechPresident.” (PdF also runs the highly trafficked site called TechPresident.) The ideal TechPresident according to Rasiej and Sifry will:

—Declare the Internet a Public Good: the government has an obligation to enable low-cost Internet access to everyone.
—Commit to Providing Affordable High-Speed Access Nationwide: Rasiej and Sifry even call for a $20 billion Internet Innovation and Investment Fund to accomplish this.
—Declare a Net Neutrality Standard: the Internet infrastructure shouldn’t be based on “old models of telephone and TV networks.”
—Start an “Every Child Connected” Initiative: with every corporation providing its employees with Internet access, schools should ensure every student, teacher and parent has the same connectivity.
—Build a Connected Democracy: citizens should have access to everything from proposed legislation to public official access online.
—Create a National Tech Corps: this is not what you might think. PdF suggests that a national NetGuard of volunteer citizens be created to “protect our communications infrastructure and be able to have an emergency response capability to establish emergency communications, rebuild networks and databases, and provide tech support for all relief and recovery efforts.” The focus here is making sure the Internet works in the event of an emergency.

What’s interesting is not the specific ideas advocated in this “call for action.” Some of the ideas proposed are too far-fetched for current political reality. For example, any declaration that the Internet is a public good would create blowback of unbelievable levels from practically every private sector participant in the Internet economy. Moreover, a welter of state and federal laws would be radically affected, and probably need to be overhauled, by such a policy pronouncement.

What’s interesting is that this list, or a similar list, of tech-related objectives could become a key part of the 2008 presidential campaign. Although tech issues have become more prominent over the past 20 years, this could become the first presidential campaign where candidates are forced to adopt well-developed positions on Internet and high-tech matters.

As the National Journal’s Hotline notes, every presidential campaign sent someone to the PdF conference, but not one of the campaigns has yet to develop a comprehensive tech policy. Now all of the campaigns have an idea to chew on, and I would be that we’re going to start seeing some kind of “tech goals” or “tech policy” papers trickling out of presidential candidates’ campaign offices.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on May 20, 2007 10:53 AM to IP Democracy