Tech Policy Debates Being Shaped Mostly by Angry, Populist Uprisings, ITIF Says

Foundation President Robert Atkinson, an author of the paper, said during the panel that to fix the tech populism trend, it's necessary to expose the tech populist demagoguery. Elected officials must lead the charge toward innovation and not bow to the pressures of digital mobs, he said, while embracing the progressive approach that expands societal benefits and mitigates specific harms. “We’re not objecting to more people getting involved in these debates -- that’s a good thing; more people should be involved in tech policy,” Atkinson said. “I’m not saying that there aren’t good arguments on either side of the issues, but there are also a set of issues that are demagoguery, that are outright lies. And when those happen, it’s our responsibility to point them out.”

The country lags in broadband adoption not because of insufficient networks but because among developed countries, the U.S. has the lowest rate of computer ownership, Atkinson said. “So we’re having this sort of yuppie, elite debate about net neutrality when we’re ignoring a much more progressive and pressing need, which is how do we close the digital divide?”

Larry Irving, president of Irving Information Group, agreed, but said he prefers the term techno elitism to techno populism. Irving, former administrator of the NTIA, said people in places like New York's Harlem can't even get access to the Internet, so policies such as net neutrality and SOPA don't matter as much. The U.S. has typically been "the voice of reason" in international discussions on Internet communication policies, he said. "When the United States starts going back in time and regulating the most important intellectual, informational and economic innovation of the last century as a utility, that's a problem. How do we now say to Iran or China or anybody else that wants to regulate this in a way that's counterintuitive to progress, if we can't have an adult conversation in our nation? If you're acting like a child, screaming in the United States, you can't become an adult and go over to an international forum."

Bruce Mehlman, a partner at Mehlman Castagnetti, said the idea that angry, populist uprisings are shaping policy debates is not just a tech-specific trend, but a macro trend that is taking over most policy debates. Mehlman was assistant secretary of commerce for technology policy in President George W. Bush’s administration and worked as the lead Republican lobbyist for Cisco Systems. He said the paper's description of a country divided very much into red states and blue states, concerns about a wave of immigration, and big banks and the very rich getting involved in politics -- as well as the concerns about income inequality -- defines the 1880s perfectly, but it also defines the current time. “History does repeat itself,” Mehlman said. “By the way, in the 1880s, there was a rising flow of technology, too. Let’s go back and learn what the lessons were because in the end a lot of problems were addressed by public policy.” Tech tools are the new “populist weapons of mass demagoguery,” he said. Never have more people had more power to influence events, thanks to all of the new technology, he said.

Elliot Maxwell, chairman of e-Maxwell and Associates, said he accepts the paper's premise, but he wants better data and analytics to back everything up. Maxwell advises public and private sector clients on strategic issues involving the intersection of business, technology and public policy in the Internet, e-commerce, healthcare, and higher education domains and was special adviser for the digital economy to Secretaries of Commerce William Daley and Norm Mineta. Instead of writing a paper about tech populism, Maxwell said he would rather see one written about how the “crapification of data, the self-interest of parties and crippling of independent analytic capabilities have in fact harmed our ability to make good policy.” He said the current paper outlined issues on one side but ignored the other side of most other technological policy debates. "We need data, we want data, sometimes we don't have data but we should have the ability to get it and that people's self-interest -- whether it is what I would think of as the caricature of everybody wanting to download pirated movies or everyone wanting to protect their margins -- corrupts the policy process. We've got to do better to provide better policy," Maxwell said. "It's up to the people who are making policy to focus on those societal benefits, sort through the data, find better ways of getting access to data, making decisions and moving forward."