For those of you who don’t work in the biz, so to speak, you may not have heard of TechPresident but it is a website run by the Personal Democracy Forum that focuses on the intersection of technology and politics.
The Personal Democracy Forum runs a website, TechPresident, that has become the focal point for a lot of chatter lately about the intersection of the internet and politics. It has been mostly a place to follow the sort of “inside baseball” chatter about how the business works. But since their conference last weekend they have launched a new project calling on the presidential candidates to be “Tech Presidents.” Their proposal encompasses six different proposals, which they say will bring technology into government and help the country. A thorough examination finds that they reflect a sort of big government thinking that one would have thought the decentralized world of the internet would naturally reject. The truth is we don’t need a “Tech President.” Technology will flourish when government stays out, not when it gets involved. I am sure that these were all very well intentioned, but each of these proposals would set the way for stagnation of ingenuity and freedom. Their proposals and my comments are below:

1. Declare The Internet a Public Good (like water, electricity, highways, public education) - This is by far the most dangerous and anti-freedom proposal, as it would basically insert the government into the regulation of every minutia of the internet. To paraphrase a famous Michael Crichton quote, “If you love the Post Office, you’ll love government run internet.” A government nationalization of the internet would destory the profit margin that currently drives the expansion of broadband access. This fundamentally is one of those right-left arguments, as conservatives we believe the market provides everyone with better choices at lower costs, while the liberals argue government needs to intervene to protect people. The fact is there is no real shortage of internet access. FiOS, a tremendous step forward for access, would be a mere dream had it not been for the competition of the marketplace driving Verizon. If anyone needs proof of this just look at how quickly internet access expanded once the cable companies entered the market place. All of a sudden the phone companies couldn’t monopolize and had to use DSL to compete. Wanting a leg up they invested millions upon millions into fiber optics research and now are spending millions laying fiber optic lines all across the country. If there is one sure way to kill innovation it would be to turn the internet into a “public good.”

2.Commit to providing affordable high-speed wireless Internet access nationwide - They propose a $20bn investment fund to be used to basically take broadband access to places where there is no market demand for access. Beyond the shocking $20bn pricetag, the proposal is done in by its own language comparing itself to highway construction. Unlike roads, there is a clear profit model for broadband access and this type of massive government intervention would essentially amount to colossal graft and waste. How much of that $20bn would ever make it into laying fiber optics? How much would get spent on “management”, “administration”, and other big government rat traps. The truth is this would be a boondoggle of tremendous proportions with little real benefit to Americans.

3. Net Neutrality - There has been thousands of pages spent on this topic alone so I won’t go down the line other than to say that government regulation deciding who wins and who loses in the market is a terrible idea.

4. Every Child Connected - Here the well meaning PDF people go entirely off the radar with a proposal to make sure every child has internet access. In Pennsylvania, there has been proposals to put a laptop on every kids desk. If you want to guarantee distracted kids looking at non-educational material all day then put a laptop on his/her desk. This is about a fundamental misunderstanding of education. This fight goes deeper than right / left, but I do believe that if we spent more time focusing on teaching kids the basics and holding them to higher standards than tryingout every ned educational fad then we’d have better educated children. Computers are a great tool, but some federal mandate to “connect every child” will fail for the same reason all like minded federal mandates do. They impose a one size fits all solution on a problem that is multi-faceted and complex.

5. Build a Connected Democracy - The big keyword here is transparency, and I absolutely LOVE this point. We have been fighting this battle in Pennsylvania for some years just trying to get roll call votes posted online. This is the only point in the proposal that I think will find broad cross partisan appeal because it is the type of commonsense solution that the web is famous for. Put information online and let us sort out the truth!

6.Create a National Tech Corps to respond to disasters - This is an idea that could be a good one or an awful one depending entirely on execution. If it is merely training National Guard folks to be more technologically aware and having special tech units that would focus on recovery efforts for technological infrastructure than thats fine. If, on the other hand, it is meant as some sort of national effort to replace the well meaning efforts of companies to do the same in the wake of disasters then let Dell, Microsoft, and others continue to donate materials and expertise without the massive overhead that is inherent in a Tech Peace Corps.

I know the people over at PDF meant this to be a well meaning at the attempt for the future of the internet. But, we must remember Reagan’s famous quote about the liberal view of the economy, “If it moves tax it, if it keeps moving regulate it, and if it stops moving subsidize it.” The internet is strong right now because of a lack of government involvement, and this type of proposal will set our tech industry on the path towards government reliance and inefficiency that we simply cannot afford. So, do we need a Tech President? No, we need a freedom President!