Susan Crawford goes to Washington
Three cheers for the future of our technology policy. The clearest thinker I know of on these matters is headed to Pennsylvania Ave. Nothing official announced AFAIK but it’s widely speculated that she will hold the title of special assistant to the president for science, technology, and innovation policy.
She understands the complex world of technology policy like few do. Most experts understand only a very narrow swath of the tech-policy landscape, which includes managing spectrum allocation, setting national broadband policy, regulating telephone and cable companies’ oligarchy, furthering the discussions around nanotechnology policy & biotech policy, and my fave – Internet policy!
DNSSEC needs to happen ASAP, a coherent national Internet defense policy needs to be articulated ASAP, the barriers protecting the telcos that have accumulated in recent years need to be torn down ASAP, and more. I’m so tired of the complete lack of leadership from the executive branch in recent years. Let the market work has been the mantra, and the results have been:
1. we see degraded service and predatory activity from the big players (I’ll pick on Comcast slowing down Internet access for certain applications as my example)
2. we see the regulatory framework constructed by Congress (just recall those terrific “Internet is a series of tubes” videos from Ted Stevens if you think Congress is capable of doing a good job with this)
So in my view we obviously need policy leadership from the top of the house, otherwise it’s relegated to Congress, and we all know where that leads. Ms. Crawford can draw upon her experience at ICANN and her knowledge of regulatory issues from her teaching experience at Yale and Michigan law school courses about communications policy issues. Go Susan go!