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"One of the topics I've touched on recently that's garnered the most interest has been the prospect of a Chief Technology Officer sitting in the cabinet of the President of the United States. It's something that's been promised as a certainty to us should we deign to elect Senator Barack Obama our next president, but exactly who and what we'll be getting out of the bargain is still pretty nebulous.\nIt's even received extra attention yesterday with the release and added emphasis on Barack Obama's technology policy. Amongst the various topics we've talked about here at Mashable, other featured pieces to the technology plank of Obama's platform include doubling basic research funding, making research and development tax rebates permanent, immigration reform and increased governmental transparency.\n\n\n\n\n\nInterestingly, most of these promises are supported by both candidates. Republicans are traditionally for any tax cuts they can get their hands on, Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin has been calling for increased governmental transparency (which interestingly was met by criticisms from Obama surrogates saying the junior senator's existing measures were good enough).\nThe key issues where the candidates differ are on how anti-trust laws are enforced and crafted and on the issue of nationalized broadband. All of these issues are somehow wrapped in the cloak of a national Chief Technology Officer (CTO).\u00A0We talked about this issue in overview a couple of weeks ago here at Mashable, but I thought I'd take a deeper look at the issue on the eve of the election, since I haven't seen a plain-English dissection of this issue anywhere this season.\nFirst, the final word on the idea of a national CTO.\nAs someone who's been given the title of CTO a couple times in my career history, I can tell you that even in technology-centric companies, the meaning changes to suit the purposes of whomever gives it, and the anecdote I've mentioned every time the topic has come up here regarding Microsoft's first CTO never fails to re-inforce that point.\nMany readers and commenters have some very idyllic ideas as to what the CTO should do or is intended to do. The most common theory is that the national CTO will be a fundraising cheerleader for government led technology initiatives which need attention, as Mashable reader Joe Hall said last time around.\nI understand the concept of a fundraising cheerleader. My point is that we don\u2019t need to raise funds for a nationalized broadband infrastructure. Last time we did something like that was the Universal Service Fund. We raised $50 billion through those efforts and nothing measurable was accomplished, because ultimately it\u2019s up to the telcos to accomplish, and they've proven they can\u2019t be trusted to follow through.\nOne of the other theories is that the CTO is simply a position for a cabinet level advisor for the president. The individual will presumably be more technology savvy than the president, and thus be much more qualified to provide valid directions for the executive branch to take in their technology decisions.\nIn and of itself, this isn't an objectionable idea, except for the fact that it's a completely redundant position to create. Shortly after the 9/11 catastrophe, President Bush created an advisory council called PCAST, which consists of venture capitalists, captains of industry, and university thought leaders. Creating even more executive level bureaucracy is not necessarily going to help things.\nOf course, if you look at the position the way I originally envisioned it when it was suggested, the case against the position becomes almost overwhelming:\n\nSo we\u2019re starting out with a nebulous position, and we\u2019re putting it in charge of interpreting the nations\u2019 technology issues, and hoping that the government won\u2019t abuse the advice to expand their own power and use it to drum up votes.\nDo you think we\u2019ll see the end of exploitation of Craigslist as a\u00A0political punching bag\u00A0anytime theirs a prostitution bust with a CTO?\u00A0 Do you think we\u2019ll see an end to\u00A0Attorney Generals using pedophilia online\u00A0as a way to scare the public and major corporations into playing ball?\nNo, of course not, they\u2019ll just have more advanced terminology to play with.\u00A0 Semantic web technology will be used to scare the electorate into outlawing the technology so we won\u2019t have a Will Smith\u00A0I, Robot\u00A0situation on our hands. Better understanding of how trojans and worms are spread will only encourage congress to pass a law requiring mandatory keyloggers on every citizen\u2019s computer.\nIf they get really altruistic and industrious, they might just get interested in protecting our privacy.\u00A0 Of course, to them that\u2019ll mean that every blogger will be required to obtain a license to operate a webserver so they can regulate how data is collected - data handling procedures that will tell you how you treat personal data entered in comments, cookies left by your ads, and disclosure of your sources.\n\nOf course, of the key technology positions Obama's advocated, whether it be under the cloak of the idea of a national CTO or on it's own has been nationalized broadband. This, too, has been a recurring topic here at Mashable.\nNationalized Broadband and the Lessons from East Asia\nOne of the interesting comparisons that keeps getting brought up is the rapid growth of the telecoms in South Korea and Japan during the 1990s, and what role their respective governments played in that growth. It tends to be brought up in the comments here at Mashable as an argument for both sides - some folks will say that the runaway growth is due to the governments' hands-off approach, while others will say that it's a direct result of governmental intervention and direction of the growth of the telecom sector.\nThe truth is somewhere in between. \u00A0It's hard to find many resources that directly touch on this bit of technological history that don't have partisan influence in their authoring, but I was able to find a research paper from Berkeley University that had a veritable treasure trove of details that provided historical perspective dating back to the 1800s. Anyone with a few hours to kill ought to check it out, but those of us interested in the parts pertinent to what we should do in America to get our broadband up to international snuff (so to speak), might be more interested in these factoids I gleaned from the paper:\n\nIn the one year between 1999 and 2001, the number of DSL subscriptions in Korea\u00A0rose from 97 thousand to 2.7 million\nIn that same year,\u00A0cable modem subscriptions increased from 17\u00A0thousand to 1.5 million.\nThe rates of growth that were experienced in Japan as well as South Korea were due to governmental de-regulation.\nIn Japan, the telecom was handled and regulated by the same division of government responsible for postal regulations (sound familiar?). Once that restriction was eliminated, the roadblocks were cleared for rapid growth.\nIn South Korea, similar governmental roadblocks were cleared, mostly having to due with censorship.\nIn both cases, demand and centralized population centers were the biggest driving factors behind adoption.\n\nOnly after rapid growth and clear dominance by a few private broadband providers had been established did the government step back in and exert a heavier hand in how the markets were regulated.\nWhich is better: bad tech policy or no tech policy?\nWhat does that mean in terms of what we should do for America? \u00A0Well, the idea that we should regulate our way to better competition and more innovation continues to be an idea that doesn't bear scrutiny. As we talked about last time around, all attempts in the past by the government to subsidize or regulate a way to wider telecom infrastructure adoption have ended in miserable failure in America or abroad.\nOn the other hand, we have a vastly different landscape in our broadband industry here than in the late 90s over in East Asia. We have what is essentially a governmental sanctioned duopoly. In most major US markets, the choice is between the phone company and the cable company. The top-tier plans are starting to reach speed parity with the announcement by Comcast to offer 50 mbs DOCSIS Internet access.\nInstead of attributing these positive moves in the US to market competition (which admittedly did play some part), it's probably more accurate to ask why this hasn't happened much sooner, since the average home connection in East Asia has been priced what an AOL dialup account costs while reaching speeds only now being achieved.\nThe answer lies in that the USA has has such a cozy relationship with the telcos and cable companies, providing subsidy and endorsement of their business model that the incentive for them to grow and innovate simply doesn't exist.\nRather than focusing on anti-trust and and subsidies, as Barack Obama intends to do, what would be better would be focusing on creating an environment where corporate taxes were lowered, and other tax incentives were emphasized for start-ups who focus on better information infrastructure. \u00A0Senator McCain's tax plan is moderately favorable towards this theory, though it is likely simply a coincidence convenient to this argument rather than a well thought out technology policy.\nWhen it comes to the basics, both presidential candidates are generally on the right track, and are generally in agreement as well. \u00A0I've outlined above where they differ, though, and I think history has shown that Barack Obama's desired policy directions would be more detrimental to innovation and growth for the tech sector.\nImagery provided by iStockPhoto/7nuit"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/11/03/techpresident/>