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Obama, McCain and the tech issues - May 27, 2008

An item tailor-made for the Policy section, Ars Technica's Julian Sanchez has an interesting article that centers on the representatives for Barack Obama and John McCain who recently addressed the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference on topics ranging from NSA surveillance to net neutrality to the competitiveness of American workers in the new economy.

Writes Sanchez: Chuck Fish, an attorney for the McCain campaign and former Time Warner executive, warned against using regulation to impose any broad network model on service providers, especially in advance of any evidence that discriminatory packet switching is causing pervasive harm. Instead, he suggested existing antitrust law could be used to address specific instances of misbehavior.

Daniel Weitzner, an MIT computer scientist and technology adviser to the Obama campaign, insisted that this was "not enough." "Openness is more important than bandwidth," said Weitzner, referring to the argument that "tiered" networks providing faster access to content providers who can pay could spur investment in fatter pipes. "I'd rather have a more open Internet at lower speeds than a faster Internet that has all sorts of discrimination built in. We've lived with tiny narrow little pipes and done extraordinary things with them."

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