John McCain, Internet dunce

[babylonsister]

John McCain, Internet dunce
Why the Arizona senator, who can barely Google, is not the chief that an increasingly technological world requires.

By Amanda Terkel

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McCain has not released a tech platform, although he may do so this week. On this front, he lags behind Barack Obama, who unveiled his last year. Mark Lloyd, vice president of strategic initiatives at the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, pointed to the fact that some of McCain's top advisors also advised Bush. "I think that the people who determine his tech policies, like Michael Powell and a few others who were his top advisors, will talk, as Bush has talked about, getting advanced telecommunications services to all Americans," said Lloyd. "But mainly their model is to allow the industry to determine what all this means, which is the danger."

These worries aren't unfounded. McCain has a long record of blocking progress on tech issues. He has served as a member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation since coming to the Senate in 1987, and as chairman from 1997 to 2001, and again from 2003 to 2005. He oversaw the committee at a crucial point in history: the explosion of the Internet economy.

During McCain's tenure, the committee oversaw the implementation of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the first major overhaul of U.S. telecom law in nearly 62 years. McCain had to choose whether to be pro-competition or pro-big business. In most instances, he chose the latter route, by opposing increased Internet access for schools and libraries, backing large mergers to benefit the telecom industry and supporting a virtual system of haves and have-nots.

Lloyd said the Senate Commerce Committee during this time devoted "far too little oversight to the good things in the 1996 Telecommunications Act." Those included "making sure there were equal opportunities to participate in the industry afforded to women and minorities and small businesses." He added, "There was a rush to essentially allow industry players to get into each other's businesses and consolidate in the industry."

McCain's long history in the Senate has one main theme: Government can do no good in telecom policy. "McCain is a pure free-market ideologue," said Mark Cooper, director of research at the Consumer Federation of America. "Their belief is that government should just get out of the way and let the private sector do it. Clearly, in the financial markets, the private sector has done a horrible job."

Other media experts have characterized McCain's Commerce Committee tenure as a lost opportunity to make progress on telecommunications policy. "The thing that stands out for his entire tenure is that he has never had a priority, and has never had, to my knowledge, any accomplishment of any kind at all," said Hundt.

McCain has said that closing the digital divide -- the gap between people with access to digital technology and those without -- is one of his top tech priorities. Speaking to the Consumer Federation of America in 2001, he said it was "our greatest challenge in the 21st century." It may therefore be surprising to learn that McCain was one of the most vocal opponents of Education Rate (E-Rate), a program designed to provide discounts to schools and libraries to connect to the Internet.

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http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/08/13/john_mccain_technology/print.html