Politechan

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.  – Ted Stevens

 

Many in the technology community scoffed at this assessment of the Internet delivered by Sentator Ted Stevens of Alaska.  ”He’s an idiot” was probably the nicest thing said by anyone in Silicon Valley after this tirade.

But just as politicians don’t really understand technology (some of them) there is also a disconnect in the technology centers of how politics works, or even more elementally, how the government process works.  I’ve been in rooms with geeks going off on this piece of legislation or that regulation and I finally had to ask them some simple questions:

Was it in the authorization or appropriation bill?

Has there been a conference report issued?

Wasn’t that just a vote on the motion to recommit?

Are you citing a NPR or the final rule (hint, that’s not the radio station)?

Of course, many techies scratched their heads, but many people in Washington could probably answer those questions off the top of their head.

So I’ve decided to take my years in technology and my years in public policy to try and come to some understanding between the political world and the technology world.  I’ll be posting more shortly trying to find nuggets of technology news in Washington but also in examining the legislative needs and legal issues surrounding some new technologies being developed on the net.

Should be fun.

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