The geek in me loves this Obama proposal:
The full plan can be seen below. It contains several new proposals, including the appointment of technology czar called a Chief Technology Officer.
The CTO’s mandate would be quite different from the Cybersecurity czar appointed under the Bush Administration. Bush’s czar helped defend against cyberattacks. Obama’s CTO, by contrast, would ensure government officials holds open meetings, broadcast live webcasts of those meetings, and use blogging software, wikis and open comments to communicate policies with Americans, according to the plan.
The plan extends Obama’s previous advocacy for more open decision making in government [...]
I. OPEN GOVERNMENT
He wants Cabinet officials, government executives and rulemaking agencies to hold meeting that are open to the public and transmitted with a live feed. The CTO’s mandate will be to ensure this happens. Specifically, Obama wants the public to be able to comment on the White House website for five days before legislation is signed.
That would be cool.
Network Neutrality is also part of Obama's plan, but I'll defer to the experts on that issue to determine whether it's good approach or not.
IV. NETWORK NEUTRALITY
Obama also is supporting network neutrality, a policy that would ensure Google wouldn’t be forced to pay an Internet service provider extra to ensure the speedy transfer of its data over the Internet. Stanford legal expert, Larry Lessig, called me up this afternoon (apparently under recommendation from the campaign) saying Obama has the most nicely balanced policy among the democrats. Obama’s plan, he says, imposes minimal regulatory burden. So: Unlike John Edwards who, proposes to “enforce net neutrality ensuring no degradation or blocking of access to websites,” Obama would not ban differential service. He would simply require that the terms offered one website or company are no better or worse than those offered anyone else. This is a kind of “most favored nations” network neutrality, much simpler to enforce than one that looks to technical factors to determine whether the regulation is obeyed. Venture people should be very interested in this, Lessig says, because “if network neutrality regulation is going to be passed (as it will if a Dem is president) this imposes a very minimal (and relatively easy to monitor) burden on network owner.”
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