This is certainly not the time in this world to be a one-issue voter — if there’s ever a good time to be one. And if you’re going to pick a single issue to base your vote for President on, make it repairing the economy or rebuilding public schools or getting out of Iraq or a forward-thinking energy policy, not whether the candidate has the right policy on the Internet. That said, this is my area of interest and perhaps expertise, so I pay a little extra attention to it. And I do agree with a number of recent commenters, that a technology policy belongs on that list of priorities; we are still in a formative time around information and communication technologies, where the policies we set today, in Congress and ther courts, will resonate for decades.
So I wanted to highlight some recent discussion of McCain’s missing technology policy statement. Obama released his several months ago, and it hits the mark on most issues, if perhaps it lacks some specifity and hews to a gentle line of progress and not a bolder one. But McCain has not released any official campaign statement about technology yet, and many have connected this both to the Bush administration’s severe and devastating disinterest in promoting scientific and technological innovation towards progressive ends, and to McCain’s campaign trail admission that he’s an Internet “illiterate,” has never emailed, and relies on his wife when they need online information. This is simply reprehensible, though again not exactly of the same scope of other crucial campaign issues. There are lots of people who do not and cannot use the Internet, of course, in this country and elsewhere. But it is primarily because they cannot afford the tools or the process of developing the skills, and/or they work in jobs that do not depend on computing. Neither of these is true for a U.S. Senator. And, as today’s Salon piece on this issue notes, it is not simply that he is older; they cite a recent Pew report that 3/4 of Americans 65 and older are on online. I think its striking that former FCC Chairman (and Obama supporter) Reed Hundt has said “Basically, John is a technological troglodyte, and proud of it.”
The Salon piece goes on to discuss McCain’s role in Congress over the last decade and a half, regarding policies relating to the Internet. Their emphasis is on the fact that McCain voted against the Telecommunications Act of 1996 because it was too regulatory — a bill that, in my opinion, has been more harmful than good because it handed too much of the shaping of the Internet over to private companies, i.e. was too deregulatory — that he worked against the “E-rate” elements of that bill, that gave federal breaks to public schools to help them establish Internet access, and most of all for co-sponsoring the Internet School Filtering Act in 1998. This one is, in my mind, the most egregious. It was co-sponsored with Ernest “Fritz” Hollings, who tech and law enthusiasts will know as one of the worst offenders in the digital copyright world, proposing bills that would have required all digital devices to incorporate DRM, at the behest of the entertainment industries. The bill required schools receiving the E-rate funding to install filtering software on their school computers, at a time when filtering software was proving to be deeply flawed, easy to circumvent, and most importantly, an easy means to censor vital online speech. And, it would have given the responsibility for imposing this rule to the FCC, a vast expansion of their jurisdiction. As Salon noted, even conservative tool Rick Santorum disagreed, and threw his support behind a gentler version of the bill — that still obligated public schools to invest in filtering software, pointlessly, at their own cost.
Whether or not McCain has personal familiarity with the Internet is less the issue here. Because you can be an Internet user and still see it as a devil’s playground full of porn and baddies, or as an pristine field perfect for the construction of a corporate shopping mall. My greater concern is the parallel with the Bush administration’s approach. Whatever McCain doesn’t know about the Internet is counterbalanced by his apparent commitment to hand over the task of guiding the U.S. telecommunications infrastructure to private corporations, and then allowing government to simply ignore the issue altogether.
Update: McCain has posted his technology policy. Lessig dissects it and finds it wanting here.