David Braue06 November 2008, 10:06 PM
Tech helped to get him elected; now Obama has plans to use it to save America and the world.
Barack Obama's ascendancy to the US presidency will be deconstructed a thousand ways, but one persistent theme has been his campaign's use of the Internet to build extensive social and organisational networks supporting probably the largest grassroots effort that country has seen.
Obama can learn much from his campaign's online success, and indeed his broader technology policy calls upon the same broad general principles of openness and equal access.
At the core of Obama's policy are perennial favourites like the "full and free exchange of ideas"; the creation of a "transparent and connected democracy"; deployment of a "modern communications infrastructure"; improvements to America's "competitiveness"; preparing children and adults for the 21st-century economy; and "using science, technology and innovation to solve our nation's most pressing problems".
Obama's Democrats also weigh in on the left, so one would expect many policy similarities. Name the problem, and Obama sees technology as the solution: for example, he aims to modernise public safety networks, build commercial-scale renewable energy infrastructure, and shift America's bloated healthcare system to electronic healthcare records – an immensely difficult task that has repeatedly failed to take off even in Australia's comparatively small and regulated healthcare market.
Skills development underscores many of Obama's plans, which include programs promoting worker retraining; systems connecting grant money and recipients; better school-age science and maths training; and strategies to increase schools' retention rates. The patent system will be modernised, intellectual property will be protected, and next-generation broadband will be deployed.
A transparent democracy? Modern communications infrastructure? If these sound familiar, it's because they and other ideas were cornerstones of our own Labor party's trouncing of the Coalition in last year's elections. Yet Obama methods are strikingly different, reflecting the different political, financial, legal and social frameworks in the US.
Media ownership, for example, will be diversified to ensure healthy competition and to promote new media outlets "for expression of diverse viewpoints"; this is a marked policy from Australia, where increasingly lax media ownership policies have fostered consolidation – leading to a reduction in editorial diversity and allowing wholesale cost-cutting such as Fairfax's recent decision to slash 550 employees from its workforce.
Obama speaks of next-generation broadband and "believes that America should lead the world in broadband penetration and Internet access." Yet there is no talk about massive government outlays like the $4.7b at the heart of Australia's increasingly tenuous NBN contract. Obama's policies are based on fostering the right environment for investment through Universal Service Fund reform (also flagged in recent Australian reviews), better use of wireless spectrum (so far ignored in Australia), and tax and loan incentives to encourage investment (the closest Australian analogue is the Australian Broadband Guarantee).
Another core Obama policy is to protect children online "while protecting the First Amendment" through delivery of tools and information to help parents control what their children see. This aligns Obama with Coalition policy, as evidenced by the Howard government's NetAlert program (since scrapped by Labor); sadly, however, Australia has since ventured into the land of farce as Conroy works to isolate Australian Internet users behind the world's biggest content filter.
It is in the face of Conroy's Net censorship aspirations that Obama's technology policy looks absolutely visionary. He speaks about protecting the openness of the internet, counteracting backroom deals by giving citizens access to initiatives such as a fully transparent government grant and funding system, and appointing a government chief technology officer to head the modernisation of that country's government.
Australia, by contrast, has seen rapid attrition among state and Commonwealth CIOs, with government becoming increasingly opaque this year as Conroy suppressed discussion and withheld information about topics including the cancellation of the Opel WiMAX contract and the policy framework for the ongoing NBN contract. Most recently, Conroy has come under fire for his efforts to stifle criticism of his national content filtering system.
Obama's resounding election success reflects both America's desire for change, and the ability of technology to unite those with that desire. Building on this momentum, Obama has made a major commitment in principle to the ailing United States high-technology industry, which will be the means to many other policy ends.
Supporting this effort is a concrete commitment to building that country's skills base; if anybody doubts whether this can be done, just consider the flurry of innovation that led American scientists to develop the nuclear bomb, the transistor, put men on the moon, and turn the Internet from being an obscure geek's paradise into a mass phenomenon that can topple presidents and sidestep totalitarianism. If Obama can foster a similar focus on skills development, America's technology industry could well become a shining star again.
Yet Obama's slate of policies has guaranteed him a busy first term: expectations are high, and even the most enthusiastic outsider can only change Washington, D.C. so far. But if he can even point the country in the right direction, Obama's leadership could – and needs to – foster a technological renaissance in that country.
Australia already leads the US in some of Obama's policy areas, but is falling embarrassingly far behind in others. If Conroy and Rudd don't take some inspiration from Obama's policy lead – and, perhaps, use it to find some commonality of purpose and execution – the gap may never be closed again.