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Obama’s innovation plan a Christmas list for the geekerati?analysis

The Obama campaign has released an extremely ambitious "technology and …

Barack Obama's campaign has now released a relatively comprehensive and extremely ambitious technology document (PDF) that lays out a whole slew of general and specific proposals for doing everything from reforming the patent system to implementing a national broadband policy. In releasing this "technology and innovation plan," Obama is the first major presidential candidate on either ticket to release a technology policy document that's this comprehensive—some of the proposals here have been pitched by Edwards and others, but Obama is the first to put them all in one place.

The document begins with a set of policy goals that pretty well sum up the major areas that the proposals address:

  • Create a transparent and connected democracy.
  • Encourage the deployment of a modern communications infrastructure.
  • Employ technology and innovation to solve our nation's most pressing problems, including reducing the costs of health care, encouraging the development of new clean energy sources, and improving public safety.
  • Improve America’s competitiveness.

If you read Lawrence Lessig's writings on corruption issues, or if you've read Ars's own coverage of H1B visa reform, network neutrality, IT and healthcare, America's R&D shortfall, media consolidation, broadband policy, ratings systems for content in games and movies, privacy, and a host of other technology policy-related issues, then you could almost flesh out the bullet points above all on your own by searching Ars for these topics and looking for the policy ideas that we seem to like.

This isn't to say that I didn't find glaring omissions and points where I disagree with the document, but I do have to admit that it reads like something that many of the (non-libertarian) writers and editors at sites like Ars, BoingBoing, Slashdot, and Wired might have gotten together and hashed out over a long weekend. Conversely, because the document envisions a fairly robust role for the federal government in technology in terms of spending, bureaucracy, and regulation, the libertarians among us—both staff and readers—will find much to dislike about it.

I'll start my discussion of Obama's plan with the two most important parts—the "open government" and "technology czar" proposals—before giving a short list of the highlights of the rest of the document, organized around issues that we've covered in the past on Ars. I'll follow this list with some critical feedback, below.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant

The "open government" section is by far the boldest and most radical part of Obama's plan. If even half of the proposals outlined here were to be implemented, it would fundamentally change the nature of our democracy for the better... which is precisely why very few of these proposals have any chance at all of ever being implemented.

Most of the proposals in this area involve using the Internet to open up the decision-making processes of the executive branch and the legislative process of congress. The idea is to give citizens a chance to view and comment on policy and legislation before it gains the force of law. Take a look at my summaries of four of them.

  • Put government data online for citizen access, analysis, commentary, and action. The document cites environmental data on pollution as one type that could be made available.
  • Effectively "crowd-sourcing" (though that term isn't used) some amount of agency decision-making by tapping the public's distributed expertise.
  • Build an online database that enables citizens to track federal grants, contracts, earmarks, and lobbyist contacts with government officials.
  • Give "the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House web site for five days before signing any non-emergency legislation."

There's a fifth sunlight proposal in Obama's list that's so gloriously idealistic and infeasible that I have to quote it in full:

Requiring his appointees who lead Executive Branch departments and rulemaking agencies to conduct the significant business of the agency in public, so that any citizen can watch a live feed on the Internet as the agencies debate and deliberate the issues that affect American society. He will ensure that these proceedings are archived for all Americans to review, discuss and respond. He will require his appointees to employ all the technological tools available to allow citizens not just to observe, but also to participate and be heard in these meetings.

It's a nice sentiment, but I seriously don't want to officially move all important federal business to golf courses and to the back rooms of DC restaurants, which is what putting a camera on these meetings would do. It would also slow the bureaucracy down even further by necessitating private meetings convened for the purpose of prepping for on-camera meetings. If you put people in front of a camera, they will eventually start to act for it.

This summary gives you an idea of what the Obama team is thinking about in the area of open government. As I read over this material, I felt that their heart was in the right place, but I'm also cynical enough to think that most of these ideas either have no chance in Washington, or they'll be worked around fairly quickly, as the cockroaches naturally find the shadows in the new terrain so that they can go on about their business.

A national technology czar

In contrast with the wonderful but idealistic transparency proposals outlined above, Obama's proposal to create the nation's first Chief Technology Officer is not only practical, but it's desperately overdue. Even Louisiana has a state CTO, and the US as a whole has needed one for the better part of a decade.

Obama proposes that the CTO focus on transparency issues, technological interoperability of government agencies, communication infrastructure for emergency response, and populating government agencies with people who have a technology background.

Other proposals

Here's quick but incomplete summary of some of the other proposals in the document:

Network neutrality: Obama comes out in full support of network neutrality legislation, but in a way that doesn't display any particularly deep technical understanding of the issue. The document worries about the possibility of "toll charges" foisted on sites by greedy "network providers," but it doesn't draw the necessary distinction between quality-of-service at the backbone level and traffic shaping at the last-mile ISP level. Still, this is more of a political document than a full-fledged policy document, so the main thing that his network neutrality stance indicates to me is that he's listening to people with whom I agree on this issue.

Media consolidation: Obama decries media consolidation and pledges to "encourage diversity" in media ownership, but beyond this there's not a lot of detail here.

Parental controls and ratings: The document proposes the creation of a modern, online answer to Sesame Street called Public Media 2.0. Aside from a name, the document doesn't say much else about this, opting instead to move into a more detailed discussion of voluntary ratings, tagging, and filtering that are generally "opt-in" by parents and industry.

Privacy: The document acknowledges that government-maintained databases on America citizens are "necessary tools in the fight against terrorism," while making general noises about safeguards. This is typical of Obama's entire section on privacy, which presumes the existence of all kinds of databases (law enforcement, health records, location data, etc.) and then talks about safeguards against abuse.

Broadband: Obama wants a national broadband policy that includes a formal redefinition of "broadband" from its current low of 200kbps, opening up the wireless spectrum to fresh competition (Google has endorsed this part of his plan), increased broadband penetration using a combination of government subsidies, the aforementioned spectrum policy reform, and public/private partnerships. The goal is for broadband access to be a widely accessible utility like phone or electricity.

H1B reform: Here's a place where Obama wants to appeal to all sides of the debate. He begins his discussion of immigration reform with a commitment to tapping more American workers (especially underrepresented minorities) for high-tech jobs, but then moves to a carefully couched suggestion that we might increase the number of H1Bs before finishing off with a nod to common criticisms of the program voiced here and in other places: "Obama will work to ensure immigrant workers are less dependent on their employers for their right to stay in the country and would hold accountable employers who abuse the system and their workers."

Investments in basic science and R&D: The basics of Obama's plan to boost American competitiveness can be summarized in this partial list: double federal funding for basic research, make existing R&D tax credits permanent, throw technology at education, reform immigration, and reform the patent system.


The document's privacy stuff is disappointingly weak. There's no mention of any kind of real legal recourse for those who've been unfairly targeted by government databases and lists, like the infamously false-positive-prone "no-fly list."

Privacy is indeed about databases, but it's not just about how law enforcement databases are used. Privacy in the digital age is about answering the following questions:

  • What kinds of databases in both the public and private sector are allowed to be created
  • What kind of data is permitted in those databases
  • Who has access to that data
  • How secure is that data
  • What happens to the data when it's no longer needed
  • How is the data corrected and updated
  • How much do people know about what kinds of things are being recorded about them, why, and by whom.
  • Who's responsible for cleaning up the mess when someone's privacy has been violated, due to a failure in the technological and/or policy safeguards implied in the bullet points above?

In other words, privacy is a much bigger issue than warrantless wiretapping, encompassing as it does issues from credit reporting to ID theft. A comprehensive privacy policy is one that takes a database record (public sector or private) as its primary object, and then asks a set of progressively more specific outcome-oriented questions about read-write-modify access and ownership of that record.

There are other problems with the document, but like the privacy issue, they're mainly matters of focus and substance. For instance, the pie-in-the-sky transparency stuff is great, but I'd rather have seen more space dedicated to the kinds of core science policy and basic research funding issues that John Timmer and I have covered over the past two years. Also critical is the issue of intellectual property reform, a topic that gets relatively short shrift in the document but without which all talk of a real "innovation plan" is meaningless.

Ultimately, however, Obama has thrown down the gauntlet to the other primary candidates with this proposal. Hillary Clinton in particular, who appears to be on the industry side of the telecom immunity and network neutrality issues, should be worried about losing ground to Obama among the wired progressive crowd because of this document.

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