Does the US Need Another Chief Technical Officer?
by Tim Swanson It already has three. The first CTO is the 30-year old, federally governed National Telecommunication and Information Administration which formulates policy and advises the president. During the Clinton-administration one of its ventures was the National Information Initiative which siphoned billions of taxpayer money into a slew of unproductive projects. This has been chronicled in the "$200 Billion Broadband Scandal" by Bruce Kushnick (pdf). The second CTO is the collective lobbying from the special interests of Big Telecom. Many of these firms not only receive legal protection over "last-mile" services, but billions in subsidies in the form of another federally managed project, the Universal Service Fund. And they just threw themselves a big party (for immunity). The third CTO, which has led a centuries old, heroic fight against federal regulators, is the individual innovator and tax producing consumer. Yet according to some pundits, the US needs a fourth CTO, in the form of another federal apparatchik. Revisionist history As Peter Klein has previously noted, while government contracts may have invented the internet, private entrepreneurs transformed it into something useful. For decades prior to deregulation, it was downright criminal to try and compete against a federally managed AT&T. And a plethora of whiz-bang inventions stayed inside monolithic government-funded laboratories because those that had invented them had no incentive to repackage them for everyday consumption. It was not until guys like Steve Jobs figured out ways to commercialize them that their full potential was tapped. Similarly, it was not until the late 1980s when the nationally funded backbones and data centers were privatized and commercialized that the Internet became useful and accessible to both the masses the innovative entrepreneur. In fact, the prime mover behind productive web 2.0 applications and services has continually been private entrepreneurs. Not a single flagship web 2.0 application was invented by government-related contracts. Similarly all of the innovation that has taken place in the WiFi arena was directly related to the fact that the federal government no longer licenses the 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz areas of the radio spectrum. Yes, believe it or not, but when the FCC actually opened up the ISM frequencies in the early 1980s, they made themselves irrelevant in the process. With any luck, white space devices will continue this trend of self-immolation. Pick and choose However, influential members of the digerati are missing the underlying libertarian theme of deregulation within the past developments. For instance, what do the following men have in common?
All of these individuals are not only at the forefront of analyzing the latest technology trends, but all of them have advocated for more federal management of both telecom and computer innovation. However, the US needs a technology CTO just like it needs a chief textile officer or CTO of dinette sets. The prescription for future innovation is not an Obama tech czar, but less regulation in which the entrepreneur is disciplined by consumer dollars, and not political action committees or the Politburo. Ever since Alexander Graham Bell’s patent 130 years ago, every administration and Congress has attempted to regulate, manage and oversee a swath of technology-related industries. And it has only held back the industries from developing and innovating.
Therefore if there is one message to get behind each and every year, just say no to CTO. Further reading:
August 29, 2008 Tim Swanson [send him mail] is a graduate of Texas A&M University. He currently lives in South Korea and is a free-lance IT consultant. Visit his blog. Copyright © 2008 LewRockwell.com
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It
is time to try a new modus operandi: no government intervention,
period. 