Senator Richard Durbin is doing something interesting over at OpenLeft.com this week: he’s asking for comments and suggestions to help him draft legislation “that will make the United States more competitive in terms of broadband access.” And he’s going to post the draft language online for viewing and comment, prior to introducing it in the Senate.
“To my knowledge,” he writes, “this method of drafting legislation – soliciting public comment, translating it into legislative language, and requesting comments prior to introduction – has never been attempted at the federal level.” I think he’s right and this is worth paying close attention to. As Durbin writes:
I think this is a unique experiment in transparent government and an opportunity to demonstrate the democratic power of the internet. If we’re successful, it could become a model for the way legislation on health care, foreign policy, and education is drafted in the future.
As Matt Stoller, one of the principal bloggers at OpenLeft and the organizer at the center of this experiment by Durbin told me yesterday, “This is not about insiders getting access, it’s about debating ideas on the most populist media ever developed.” Hear, hear!
It’s significant that Durbin is trying this method of crafting legislation around an issue that has, until now, been completely in the thrall of telecom industry lobbyists. And as Jose Antonio Vargas of the Washington Post reminded us yesterday, while we’re all marveling at the first presidential debate to embrace voter-generated video from YouTube, the digital divide in America has only gotten worse in the last ten years. Less than a mile and a half from the Citadel, where yesterday’s debate was held, Vargas spoke to residents of a public housing project who, at best, go online with a dial-up connection. Meanwhile, you can’t even apply for a job at a Fortune 500 company unless you can submit it online.
So as Senator Durbin starts gathering comments about how to go forward, we want to make two suggestions. The first is to take a careful look at the “Who Will Be America’s First TechPresident?” call that we published here two months ago. As we wrote there:
Market players have worked the levers of government to create a scarcity for Internet access when it is naturally abundant. We need to protect the Internet from the control of those who would prefer to make it scarce and guarantee that its value is delivered equally from the poorest to the richest citizen.
Our goals, in brief, were to 1) Declare the internet a public good in the same way we think of water, electricity, highways, or public education; 2) Commit to providing affordable high-speed wireless internet access nationwide; 3) Embrace Net Neutrality; 4) Make our goal “Every Child Connected,” instead of “No Child Left Behind,” 5) Commit to building a connected democracy where it becomes commonplace for local as well as national government proceedings to be heard by anyone any time and over time (kudos therefore to Durbin for enacting this idea in practice); and 6) Create a national Tech Corps, akin to a national guard for protecting and maintaining our communications infrastructure.
Our second suggestion is to take a careful look at the arguments of Susan Crawford, David Isenberg, and David Weinberger, who have all made the strong case that simply enacting network neutrality is not enough to protect the freedom and vitality of the net, and that we must also press for a strict separation between the businesses of creating content and delivering it online. Specifically, look at “Moving Slowly in the Fast Lane,” by Crawford; “Making Network Neutrality Sustainable,” by Isenberg; and “Deliminate the Bastards!” by Weinberger. The more the incumbent phone and cable companies can monopolize the internet service delivery business while at the same time becoming content providers and brokers, the more they have a dangerous incentive to block competitive innovation that might threaten the artificial market scarcities they’ve built their prime businesses upon.
Technorati Tags: David Isenberg, David Weinberger, network neutrality, OpenLeft.com, Susan Crawford, Richard Durbin