Barack Obama's Technology Policy Position Paper: Part 1 of 5

December 26, 2007

In November, U.S. Democratic Party Presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama released his 2008 technology policy position paper. The paper is entitled: Barack Obama: Connecting and Empowering All Americans Through Technology and Innovation.

I reviewed this paper for the non-partisan politics-information site PoliticalBase.

Here's Part 1 of my 5 part analysis:

I will discuss my take on the five points in Illinois Sen. Barack Obama's technology platform.

The platform, which was released a couple of weeks ago, is entitled "Barack Obama: Connecting And Empowering All Americans Through Technology and Innovation." As you can tell, I've just buil a link to it.

In the document, Sen. Obama discusses his five-point "comprehensive technology and innovation" plan.

The five components of this plan call for:

Ensuring the full and free exchange of information among Americans through an open Internet and diverse media outlets.

Creating a transparent and connected democracy.

Encouraging the deployment of a modern communications infrastructure.

Employing 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.

Improving America's competitiveness.

All worthy goals, but let us not just stop there. In this post, we'll consider the first goal. As I have told you, it calls for Ensuring "the full and free exchange of information among Americans through an open Internet and diverse media outlets."

My read tells me that in this section, Obama seems to care most about what is often referred to as "net neutrality."

For him, this means a prohibition against carriers essentially creating a "two-tier" Internet by envoking "toll charges" on content not produced by business partners and/or advertisers of those carriers.

As with other liberal politicians, however, Obama seems to be struggling with how to balance child protection (a sure vote-getter if it is perceived to be done right), vs. "preserving the First Amendment."

After sloganeering about the need for "sanity, not censorship," Obama seems to craft a vision in which persuasion of content providers not to show inappropriate content, and voluntarily - but not necessarily statutorily- giving parents the option of screening out such online content and giving them the tools to do so.

In our next post, we will look at Sen. Obama's articulation for how to "crate a transparent and connected democracy."