Dueling high-tech agendas In coming years, the debate for control of the nation’s high-tech policy agenda will become as fierce, and perhaps as important, as any in official Washington. Given high-tech is the engine of the knowledge-based economy, it would be wise for the wireless industry to engage in this dialogue.
Despite the high-tech trappings, this is a fundamental debate as old as the Republic itself. It’s about the role of government.
Before his downfall, House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.)-aided by the Progress & Freedom Foundation and the Heritage Foundation-made technology policy an issue of national debate by demanding the Federal Communications Commission surrender to market forces. In other words, zero out the FCC.
Though that movement has lost steam with the House GOP’s decline, the debate is far from over. Last week offered a sneak preview of coming attractions.
The Progressive Policy Institute, the think-tank arm of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, launched the Technology, Innovation and New Economy Project that wireless entrepreneur and Dem insider Mark Warner will chair.
A New Economy Task Force comprising elected policy makers and high-tech gazelles is cochaired by Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and Gateway Chief Executive Officer Ted Waitt.
“Government should be reinvented to be as fast, responsive and flexible as the economy and society with which it interacts. The new model of governing is decentralized, non-bureaucratic, catalytic and empowering,” states the Project in the new publication, The New Economy Index.
Contrast that with the Annual Cato Institute/Forbes ASAP conference on Technology & Society last week in San Jose, Calif.: “Washington, D.C., vs. Silicon Valley.”
Where centrist Dems concede at least a limited role for government in high-tech policy, Cato libertarians assume there’s too much government already.
It all sounds like pretty heady stuff to me. It is, I guess. But don’t be too impressed. The debate is less than intellectually honest and has some holes.
For instance, if you’re one of many thousands laid off by a high-tech giant in this economic transformation, talk of high salaries and a higher standard of living promised by the new economy doesn’t quite cut it.
Why, given such confidence in the private sector, did the GOP-led Congress and the Clinton administration agree to subsidize Internet hookups for schools, libraries and hospitals when it’s unclear whether there’s enough money to support basic telephone service for low-income and rural folks?
Also, free marketeers in recent years have been quick to point to the computer industry as an example of a high-tech sector that has flourished without government regulation. So why not the same for the telecom industry, they ask?
But how do you explain the Progress & Freedom Foundation’s embrace of a letter signed by former Reagan and Bush administration officials that applauds the Justice Department’s antitrust crackdown on Microsoft Corp.?
DOJ is government. What makes this government intervention acceptable when it is otherwise antithetical to free market fundamentalism? Maybe it’s a Bill Gates thing.
