Personal Democracy Forum 2008
Note by Thirsy Mind:
National Tech Policy: Which Way Forward?
What would do for executive order #1 as president?
Cerf: abolish the FCC
Schonfeld: digital bill of rights
Ross: Appointment of chief technology officer (tech administration was gutted by Bush)
Silver: Use the bully pit to educate Americans on how the media is so reliant on the internet – make it relevant
Prado: Give cabinet a week to understand digital DNA.
Cerf: A CTO is top-down, that’s not the internet style. Too central, doesn’t enable folks.
Ross: CTO is not a panacea. Obama has a challenge of how to continue bringing in people outside the process. How can you live the values from which you benefited? Citizen-centred candidacy to citizen-centred government. A lot of these ideas come from outside politics – entrepreneurs citizen, journalists, people outside the US. The only candidate who speaks about digital divide is Obama. Minorities lag in education – this is a lever to help bridge that gap. Use universal service subsidies for internet, not just phone.
P: We’re blurring the frontier between civil society and government. We have activists inside government, even anarchists. Something bottom-up is happening. End of central authority, to periphery. We have 19th and 21st century realities.
R: Internet for Everyone coalition is a group of stakeholders outside government. Innovation comes from the periphery – this will mainstream the concerns of net neutrality.
Andrew: Pesce spoke up how people are skimming from pre-industrial to digital era. 95% of behaviour in life maintaining your position. Baby Boomers are complacent and like their position – how much of the US being held back is people not getting it?
C: Internet-enabled mobile will come to developing world before internet computers. Becomes an information portal you carry around on your hip. People use these for very local questions – the geographic web is really interesting. It will be information free of gatekeepers.
P: Govt needs to understand the new possibilities. Government should think of democratizing access, forget about piracy.
S: People don’t realize the fact their iphone only works with AT&T is a conscious policy decision. 95% of Americans can only buy broadband from a cable duopoly. These companies are misbehaving children who are paranoid about what the future could bring – Vint Cerf & Google, or lefties who want to regulate everything. Once we make it understood that the public’s needs to come first – with dovetails to other industries – we’ll realize the opportunity we have. Kick out the bums and create a better media system.
C: Those companies are just responding to their incentives. We need to change to those incentives. It might mean a regulatory change, or it could mean something else…so they do the right thing.
A: How can we have this conversation in a duopoly?
C: Those people need to be at the table.
S: We need competition, open it up. My friend in France is paying way less, due to more competition.
Schonfeld: Right now the spectrum is auctioned off. Companies can afford to buy spectrum and park it.
C: Opening up to multiple use would lead to more efficient use. We need a government that wants to explore the possibilities.
Schonfeld: The president could appoint someone to the FCC without a technical background, at least one could be a non-lawyer.
C: We build roads, but we let people decide what to use on the roads. We don’t build redundant networks. Building multiple single-use networks is super redundant. Maybe the underlying transport should not be competitive, but provided by the government? If competition doesn’t work, then we need another answer.
A: In NYC, we built a water system by government and helped make it a world class city. If water-carrying firms could have blocked that, everything would suck,
Schonfeld: We need more competition, not socializing the internet.
C: It could work, government can do it better.
Q: Teaching kids to upload?
P: People in Brazil never see technology as something of theirs. They’ve never heard of copyright. If you try to explain it after they know copyleft, it’s totally foreign.
<dispute over term ‘peeracy’>
C: Regulations are rooted in the technologies that founded them.
Q: Why is there such apathy on tech issues in the US?
C: Other countries have bigger populations, and they’re getting better-educated. We can never win on the numbers – we need to win based on thinking.
Schonfeld: There’s a talent problem.
S: Digital divide stats. Gap between broadband and no net is the same as the old gap between dialup and none. Racial minorities are particularly poorly connected.
Q: Internet for everything, not just everyone. In 2016, there will be tens of billions of devices online. What applications will there be?
R: Asymmetry based on race, even when controlled by income. This is due to content gap as well as access gap – internet is English, high vocabulary. One of the successes of TV is PBS, radio is NPR. There isn’t a public-private partnership on the internet, with public purpose media. Educational in nature. Why people don’t go online: fear of the media and perception that there’s nothing online for me. Seems ridiculous, but need to recognize the data.
C: Non-English internet is growing. More Chinese online than Americans.
A: No presidential campaign had a Spanish-language website.
Tim Wu: This tension between centralized and decentralized decisions. CTO vs decentralized outcomes. In the Australian election, broadband was a significant plank of the platform. Will broadband issues always be a low-tier issue in the US?
C: In Virginia, people are concerned about transportation infrastructure, so this is possible.
C: In Australia and New Zealand, regulation has opened up the internet.
P: The internet is an international issues, not just national issues.
S: My mom never understood my job. But she recently forwarded me an email from a Moveon campaign – she wants me to save the internet. Need to put in simple terms: firefighters died in the WTC, but cops didn’t, because their radios worked better – so we need a better radio network. Frame things in simple terms.
<battery dies>
What would do for executive order #1 as president?
Cerf: abolish the FCC
Schonfeld: digital bill of rights
Ross: Appointment of chief technology officer (tech administration was gutted by Bush)
Silver: Use the bully pit to educate Americans on how the media is so reliant on the internet – make it relevant
Prado: Give cabinet a week to understand digital DNA.
Cerf: A CTO is top-down, that’s not the internet style. Too central, doesn’t enable folks.
Ross: CTO is not a panacea. Obama has a challenge of how to continue bringing in people outside the process. How can you live the values from which you benefited? Citizen-centred candidacy to citizen-centred government. A lot of these ideas come from outside politics – entrepreneurs citizen, journalists, people outside the US. The only candidate who speaks about digital divide is Obama. Minorities lag in education – this is a lever to help bridge that gap. Use universal service subsidies for internet, not just phone.
P: We’re blurring the frontier between civil society and government. We have activists inside government, even anarchists. Something bottom-up is happening. End of central authority, to periphery. We have 19th and 21st century realities.
R: Internet for Everyone coalition is a group of stakeholders outside government. Innovation comes from the periphery – this will mainstream the concerns of net neutrality.
Andrew: Pesce spoke up how people are skimming from pre-industrial to digital era. 95% of behaviour in life maintaining your position. Baby Boomers are complacent and like their position – how much of the US being held back is people not getting it?
C: Internet-enabled mobile will come to developing world before internet computers. Becomes an information portal you carry around on your hip. People use these for very local questions – the geographic web is really interesting. It will be information free of gatekeepers.
P: Govt needs to understand the new possibilities. Government should think of democratizing access, forget about piracy.
S: People don’t realize the fact their iphone only works with AT&T is a conscious policy decision. 95% of Americans can only buy broadband from a cable duopoly. These companies are misbehaving children who are paranoid about what the future could bring – Vint Cerf & Google, or lefties who want to regulate everything. Once we make it understood that the public’s needs to come first – with dovetails to other industries – we’ll realize the opportunity we have. Kick out the bums and create a better media system.
C: Those companies are just responding to their incentives. We need to change to those incentives. It might mean a regulatory change, or it could mean something else…so they do the right thing.
A: How can we have this conversation in a duopoly?
C: Those people need to be at the table.
S: We need competition, open it up. My friend in France is paying way less, due to more competition.
Schonfeld: Right now the spectrum is auctioned off. Companies can afford to buy spectrum and park it.
C: Opening up to multiple use would lead to more efficient use. We need a government that wants to explore the possibilities.
Schonfeld: The president could appoint someone to the FCC without a technical background, at least one could be a non-lawyer.
C: We build roads, but we let people decide what to use on the roads. We don’t build redundant networks. Building multiple single-use networks is super redundant. Maybe the underlying transport should not be competitive, but provided by the government? If competition doesn’t work, then we need another answer.
A: In NYC, we built a water system by government and helped make it a world class city. If water-carrying firms could have blocked that, everything would suck,
Schonfeld: We need more competition, not socializing the internet.
C: It could work, government can do it better.
Q: Teaching kids to upload?
P: People in Brazil never see technology as something of theirs. They’ve never heard of copyright. If you try to explain it after they know copyleft, it’s totally foreign.
<dispute over term ‘peeracy’>
C: Regulations are rooted in the technologies that founded them.
Q: Why is there such apathy on tech issues in the US?
C: Other countries have bigger populations, and they’re getting better-educated. We can never win on the numbers – we need to win based on thinking.
Schonfeld: There’s a talent problem.
S: Digital divide stats. Gap between broadband and no net is the same as the old gap between dialup and none. Racial minorities are particularly poorly connected.
Q: Internet for everything, not just everyone. In 2016, there will be tens of billions of devices online. What applications will there be?
R: Asymmetry based on race, even when controlled by income. This is due to content gap as well as access gap – internet is English, high vocabulary. One of the successes of TV is PBS, radio is NPR. There isn’t a public-private partnership on the internet, with public purpose media. Educational in nature. Why people don’t go online: fear of the media and perception that there’s nothing online for me. Seems ridiculous, but need to recognize the data.
C: Non-English internet is growing. More Chinese online than Americans.
A: No presidential campaign had a Spanish-language website.
Tim Wu: This tension between centralized and decentralized decisions. CTO vs decentralized outcomes. In the Australian election, broadband was a significant plank of the platform. Will broadband issues always be a low-tier issue in the US?
C: In Virginia, people are concerned about transportation infrastructure, so this is possible.
- People don’t think of the internet as a government responsibility.
C: In Australia and New Zealand, regulation has opened up the internet.
P: The internet is an international issues, not just national issues.
S: My mom never understood my job. But she recently forwarded me an email from a Moveon campaign – she wants me to save the internet. Need to put in simple terms: firefighters died in the WTC, but cops didn’t, because their radios worked better – so we need a better radio network. Frame things in simple terms.
<battery dies>
