The Obama Plan To Preserve a Free And Open Internet

It's fair to say that Barack Obama would not have become President without the Internet. Not without the blogosphere or the larger netroots, but the Internet. It became this incredible organizing tool for his campaign, yielding millions of volunteer actions and coordinating it all with the most efficiency and lowest cost. There is no way a volunteer architecture like that could have existed without the Internet. So this President, more than anyone, understands the power of online activity, and the need to keep it open and free.

Which is why this pleasant news doesn't surprise me:

The Federal Communications Commission's proposal of new rules to prevent companies such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from deliberately blocking or slowing certain Web traffic is expected to receive a passing three votes out of the five-member agency, according to sources.

The proposal, to be announced Monday by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, will include an additional guideline for carriers that they make public the way they manage traffic on their network, according to sources at the agency. The additional guideline would be a "sixth principle" to four existing guidelines adopted in 2005 on Internet network operations. A fifth principle is expected to be announced by Genachowski on Monday during a speech at the Brookings Institute that would prohibit the discrimination of applications and services on telecommunications, cable and wireless Internet networks.

That speech is right here and it's a good one. Genachowski explains that the Internet derives its power completely from its openness, its freedom from bias toward any particular content that allows for expansion and innovation. If you want the short version of Genachowski's argument, it's here. Read it.

Genachowski's FCC team has created a website at OpenInternet.gov. If the Obama Administration does nothing else, by preserving a free and open Internet and keeping the telecoms at bay he will have made a great contribution to America's future.



...Joe Sestak's campaign just emailed me this:

"This is the right thing for consumers," Congressman Sestak said. "At the end of the day, maintaining equal access to the Internet is what matters. Consumers should decide what content they view and their Representatives in Congress should not surrender that right to special interest pressure in favor of a system where corporations selectively control our access to the internet."

Good for him coming out in support.

Next Up, Specter Steals Candy From Baby

Even for someone as unprincipled as Arlen Specter, this is cynical:

He's touting--and raising money from--a website called specterforthecure.com, which he describes as "a bold new initiative to reform our government's medical research efforts, cut red tape and unstrangle the hope for accelerated cures."

But the money he's raising isn't funding research grants, or advocacy, or treatment for patients who can't afford it. It's funding the Senate re-election campaign of one Arlen Specter.

He will be running for in Pennsylvania as a Democrat in 2010 in what could be a fraught and dramatic campaign, and if he's primaried, he may need buckets full of money to prevail. This is one...creative...method of raising that money.

Brian Beutler is being far too charitable. The site, while specifically describing that money raised would go to Specter's re-election, has the look of a charity for cancer research. There's also the false notion that cancer research dies without Arlen Specter guiding it in the Senate.

Lots of politicians build these websites around particular initiatives of theirs that are actually list-building tools and donation-grabbers. I haven't seen one quite as egregious as Specter's, essentially saying "Vote for me or your mom will die of cancer."

All the more reason why we need a primary in PA-Sen next year. The PCCC is running an online straw poll over whether "a Draft Sestak movement (should) be created to take on Sen. Arlen Specter in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary?" The poll's running about 88% yes. Add your voice to it.

...let me re-emphasize that Sestak is not great. He voted for the FISA Amendments Act and war funding and is wavering on a public option for health care. He's a fairly moderate to conservative Democrat. But that beats a Republican pretending to be a Democrat to keep his job, in my book.

The Lessons Of Chrysler

The bankruptcy judge in the Chrysler case basically told the hedge fund babies to quit their bitchin'.

The judge overseeing the bankruptcy of Chrysler on Tuesday took a significant step toward allowing the sale of most of the automaker to Fiat, approving the bidding procedures advocated by the company and backed by the Obama administration.

The decision by the federal bankruptcy judge, Arthur J. Gonzalez, is a setback for a group of Chrysler creditors who have argued that liquidation of the company or some other transaction could yield greater value. These lenders, primarily investment firms, have said that the plan for the Fiat transaction ran afoul of bankruptcy law and would chill efforts by others to produce competing, potentially higher bids.

But Judge Gonzalez disagreed, saying, “The court concludes that the bidding procedures are appropriate and necessary.” [...]

Judge Gonzalez earlier ordered the disclosure of identities of the Chrysler creditors, who had said making them public could lead to retaliation. A lawyer representing them claimed that the creditors had been harassed, and some had even received death threats.

Judge Gonzalez, said that their lawyers had not presented enough evidence of risk and gave the creditors until Wednesday morning to reveal their identities. The primary evidence cited by their lawyers was a set of anonymous comments on The Washington Post Web site.

These "death threats" that keep popping up every time a big-time financial company gets challenged never made sense to me. Now that I see they come from random Internet commenters named "jerkhoff" and it all becomes clear - they use whatever they can find to gather sympathy and chill dissent.

Meanwhile, as the deal moves forward, a couple lessons from how Chrysler dealt with its insolvency can be gleaned. First of all, Chrysler's road to profitability comes from importing the technology and management, not outsourcing the labor.

This big story was so easily missed because it runs against one of the main myths that our elites have cultivated about the US economy: that the country has a "comparative advantage" in highly skilled labor. In this story, the United States will continue to lose manufacturing and other "less-skilled" jobs as its economy becomes more concentrated in highly skilled sectors.

While this story of the US becoming a high skills center in the world economy may have been comforting to the elites, and was widely promoted by economists and the news media, there was never much truth to it. Highly skilled professionals did well in recent decades not because they succeeded in international competition, but rather because they were largely sheltered from it [...]

The end result of this protectionism for those at the top is a bloated overpaid sector of top managers, which is what we saw at Chrysler. If we compare wages for assembly-line workers in Europe and the United States, there would not be much difference between the pay of UAW members and their counterparts in Europe. However, there would be a very large difference between the multi-million dollar pay packages of the top executives at the US companies and their European counterparts. The pay gaps persist among the more highly paid engineers and management personnel.

Therefore, it was only logical that a bailout of Chrysler would seek to take advantage of the lower cost management and design skills available at a European car company like Fiat. In Chrysler, as in other companies, the high pay packages for these people are like an anchor dragging them down in international competition. If the US is to be competitive in the 21st century, we must either bring the pay of those at the top back down to earth or we should look to follow the lead of Chrysler and contract out for these services.

If only the bank executives competed on a level playing field with top talent abroad, most of whom get less in compensation and bonuses. And if only this perspective on restructuring and reducing in size were applied to the banks as well.

In return for its major loans to floundering auto companies too big and strategic to be allowed to go under, the Treasury opted for a structured bankruptcy, converting its loans to shares, ousting top executives, shrinking the companies. In return for its mega-loans to floundering banks that were also too big and strategic to fail, the Treasury has not opted for structured bankruptcy, has not converted its loans into shares, has not forced out top executives, has not moved to make banks smaller (save in its proposal to limit leverage). Indeed, its bailout of AIG rewarded bondholders such as Goldman Sachs to the detriment of everyone else.

Why the difference? Why compel the restructuring of one crucial industry and leave another, whose mismanagement all but brought down the world economy, basically untouched? Could it be that the leaders and folkways of American banking are familiar to the men who run the Treasury, while the leaders and folkways of the American auto industry are not -- meaning that they can assess Detroit more dispassionately than they can Wall Street? In short, where is the Treasury's Ron Bloom for banking?

If the Chrysler bailout turns out properly, maybe the Administration could take the hint.

Beware Politicians Who Know Nothing About Technology

So Norm Coleman's campaign somehow put their entire donor list on an unsecured database, including "names, email and home addresses, credit card numbers and the three-digit security codes." Basically everyone who gave money to the Coleman campaign through the Internet had their credit card exposed. Norm Coleman just made a statement blaming this leak on "political enemies."

Norm Coleman just delivered a statement outside the Minnesota courtroom, addressing the breach of security on his online donors' data -- and putting the blame squarely on political opponents, who are allegedly attempting to scare Coleman's supporters out of donating.

"It is obviously an attack on this campaign," said Coleman. "But beyond that, just in terms of the campaign we're involved in a very expensive legal proceeding. Online fundraising is a very critical element of that, and clearly the theft of this information, the publication of this information undermines that. But this is more about my campaign or the ability to fund a legal effort or campaign. We do so much online. Politics today relies on online fundraising, and unfortunately we find ourselves in a situation where the level of trust and confidentially in that information is severely undermined."

This reminds me of the time Joe Lieberman said that his site was "hacked" on Election Day by Ned Lamont supporters, when two seconds of scrutiny revealed that Lieberman was paying some dude five bucks to serve his site and it couldn't handle the traffic. In this case, nobody "hacked" Coleman's site, as Wikileaks explains.

Although politically interesting in their own right, the lists, which are part of an enormous 4.3Gb database leak from the Coleman campaign, provide proof to the rumors that sensitive information--including thousands of supporter's credit card numbers--were put onto the Internet on January 28 as a result of sloppy handling.

Senator Coleman collected detailed information on every supporter and website visitor and retained unencrypted credit card information from donors, including their security codes. Although made aware of the leak in January, Senator Coleman kept the breach secret, failing to inform contributors, in violation of Minnesota Statute 325E.61.

The statute states that organizations that become aware of such a disclosure of sensitive unencrypted personal information must notify the individuals concerned "in the most expedient time possible and without unreasonable delay" and "immediately following discovery."

The information circulated on the Internet for six weeks before a warning was sent by Wikileaks to those affected, pending its analysis of the material.

Yesterday Wikileaks sent two notifications to Coleman's supporters as a courtesy prior to releasing a subset of the data.

Idiots. Anyone dumb enough to let a list full of your donor's credit card numbers find its way onto a publicly accessible database is practically an accessory to the crime. Coleman's people clearly don't know what they are talking about and don't understand that they are criminally liable.

This is another reason why I don't donate to Republicans.

...Coleman's donors are pissed. I wonder how he thinks he'd win a revote after alienating his entire donor base...

DiFi Tries To Hand Corporations A Giveaway In The Stimulus

The final numbers on the stimulus package are trickling out. Some of the baseline investments are here:

* Investments in Infrastructure and Science - $120 billion
* Investments in Health - $14.2 billion
* Investments in Education and Training - $105.9 billion
* Investments in Energy, including over $30 billion in infrastructure - $37.5 billion
* Helping Americans Hit Hardest by the Economic Crisis - $24.3 billion
* Law Enforcement, Oversight, Other Programs - $7.8 billion

It's unquestionable that the conference report is worse than the House bill but better than the Senate. It costs less than the Senate bill while providing more stimulus. Some bad spending like the clean coal "FutureGen" project is out, along with some of the worst corporate tax breaks. Mass transit spending is up, the child tax credit was partially restored to House levels (now kicking in after $3,000 in income), and the state fiscal stabilization fund gets around $54 million (but that includes funding for school construction). You can find the full summary here.

There are some very solid elements to the bill. White House economists estimate that the package will create or save 396,000 jobs in California and 3.5 million nationwide. This is a down payment on a new generation of investment in America.

However, like with most Congressional sausage-making, there may be some rough patches. The worst is the allegation that Dianne Feinstein is trying to include filtering into the stimulus as part of the program to expand broadband capacity across the country.

The Open Internet Coalition - which includes groups like Public Knowledge, Free Press and the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) - is applauding the more than $2 billion expected to be in the stimulus bill for broadband build-out in rural or underserved areas. They say not only will building out high-speed Internet instantly create jobs, but giving people in those areas more access to the Internet will spur small-business creation and other growth [...]

These groups are also over-the-moon about the fact that the Senate bill has a non-discrimination, interconnection requirement that essentially says any provider receiving stimulus funding has to make sure they provide equal access to everyone over their network (part of the so-called "net neutrality" debate). The House version requires the FCC to define "open access," which essentially calls for carriers to share their networks with competitors.

But they're worried Hollywood is still trying to insert a content filtering provision via Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., at the last minute. Feinstein has been trying to add language specifying that Internet service provider (ISPs) may engage in "reasonable network management" ... "such as" efforts to combat illegal activity like "child pornography and copyright infringement." In essence, some argue, ISPs would be able to monitor any content coming to and from your computer, just in case there was some copyrighted material violating fair use, or kiddie porn in there.

But groups like the Motion Picture Association of America stress the "network management" angle of the bill ("filtering" is a nasty word around these parts). After all, it's hard to argue against stopping kiddie porn from being sent over one's pipes. I've left a message with Feinstein's press office to see what the status of her amendment is. It doesn't appear to be in there, but I'll let you know if she plans on trying to stick it in at some point.

"Of course we see huge privacy invasions from this sort of thing," said Cathy Sloan of CCIA.

Now, some caveats. There was a hyperventilating story in the UK Register claiming that this would kill net neutrality. As stated earlier, there are open access provisions in the stimulus, and it doesn't appear that this amendment even made it into the final version. This looks to me to be more of a privacy and anti-competition issue.

In another part of that story, Henry Waxman was implicated. His office has assured multiple constituents, including yours truly, that he has had nothing to do with any filtering amendment.

That's not to say that we shouldn't be concerned. DiFi is allegedly trying to pay back a corporate constituent with a highly invasive amendment that would certainly violate the spirit if not the letter of privacy laws. And of course this kind of monitoring is a slippery slope, as are most IP issues. At the root I agree with John Cole:

As baseball season is getting close, I would like to propose a trade. We give the Republicans Dianne Feinstein and a PTBNL and they give us Olympia Snowe. This is a solid trade for us. With Judd Gregg at commerce, we would almost complete the New England rout, and Feinstein, as a newly minted Republican, will go down to certain defeat in California. Additionally, there is nothing in this agreement that says the PTBNL can’t be Nelson or Lieberman.

But Think Of The Children!

Or, rather, think of the distortions we peddle to get you to think of the children!

The Internet may not be such a dangerous place for children after all.

A task force created by 49 state attorneys general to look into the problem of sexual solicitation of children online has concluded that there really is not a significant problem.

The findings ran counter to popular perceptions of online dangers as reinforced by depictions in the news media like NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” series.

Wait, you mean a sensationalized television show doesn't provide the whole story? You mean not everyone on the Internet is a pervert?

Well, blow me down.

“This shows that social networks are not these horribly bad neighborhoods on the Internet,” said John Cardillo, chief executive of Sentinel Tech Holding, which maintains a sex offender database and was part of the task force. “Social networks are very much like real-world communities that are comprised mostly of good people who are there for the right reasons.” [...]

The task force, led by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, looked at scientific data on online sexual predators and found that children and teenagers were unlikely to be propositioned by adults online. In the cases that do exist, the report said, teenagers are typically willing participants and are already at risk because of poor home environments, substance abuse or other problems.

Can't wait until Joe Lieberman gets the news. Think of how great he'll feel to be able to stop endlessly moralizing!

The Internet is "dangerous" in the same respect that walking down the street is "dangerous." The meme was always pushed by over-sensitive figures on the theocratic right who wanted to use fear as a weapon to censor and stifle dissent. It happens to be untrue.

The New Third Rail

Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal today wrote a much-discussed article theorizing that Google has changed their position on net neutrality and is now approaching cable and Internet providers to get their content a faster lane on the Internet. They also quote a bunch of technology leaders in the article who they claim are edging away from the principles of a free and open Internet.

Most of the stakeholders are calling the article a load of crap. Lawrence Lessig says he was misquoted and that the WSJ mistakes "delivery" for "access." There is a lot of confusion there. Right now consumers can pay more for a faster connection to the Internet. That's not the issue. The issue is if content providers are made to pay to serve their content quicker. That's what would set up a two-tiered Internet and ghetto-ize any company who would be unwilling or unable to pay. I generally believe everyone should have quality and affordable access, but delivery is clearly more important for a network-neutral Internet.

Google's Public Policy blog says that what it's doing is "edge caching," basically setting up their content physically closer to end users so that less bandwidth is needed to access them, optimizing the experience for the user. Frequently the same content has to be loaded and reloaded several times to get from the provider to the user. Reducing that duplication is beneficial to virtually everyone. Atrios rightly brings up the concern that these arrangements, if done exclusively with particular content providers, would have the effect of privileging one set of content over another, but Google claims that the arrangement is non-exclusive:

All of Google's colocation agreements with ISPs -- which we've done through projects called OpenEdge and Google Global Cache -- are non-exclusive, meaning any other entity could employ similar arrangements. Also, none of them require (or encourage) that Google traffic be treated with higher priority than other traffic. In contrast, if broadband providers were to leverage their unilateral control over consumers' connections and offer colocation or caching services in an anti-competitive fashion, that would threaten the open Internet and the innovation it enables.

Despite the hyperbolic tone and confused claims in Monday's Journal story, I want to be perfectly clear about one thing: Google remains strongly committed to the principle of net neutrality, and we will continue to work with policymakers in the years ahead to keep the Internet free and open.

The consensus seems to be that the WSJ story is bogus. David Isenberg, Tim Karr and Reuters are worth reading on this. Matt Stoller is still being somewhat cautious and trying to gather all the data. I think what's most notable is how everyone exploded at the very suggestion of whether or not the principle of net neutrality was being eroded. The differences on what regulation is needed among allies in the movement for a free and open Internet may indeed by real, but nobody wants to be on the side of restricting access or innovation. So that fear, the new third rail of American politics, if you will, is going to be something powerful to harness by advocates to make sure that the core principles are maintained.

Building A National Broadband Policy

I'm going to step aside from the Blagojevich chronicles for a minute to address a crucially needed investment for our future - a national broadband strategy. The United States is 15th in the world in broadband penetration, and offers download speeds at 10 times slower rates than in Japan, for example. This is despite the costliness of broadband usage in this country (we are 18th in cost per megabyte).

Over the weekend I was able to take part in a first-of-its-kind town hall meeting put together by Internet for Everyone and its parent company Free Press. The program featured speakers and short videos stressing the need for universal broadband access and a network-neutral Web, but the main thrust of the meeting was to start a conversation. Internet for Everyone introduced four topics:

Access: Every home, business and civic institution in America must have access to high-speed Internet.

Choice: Consumers must enjoy real competition among Internet providers to achieve lower prices and higher speeds.

Innovation: The Internet should continue to create good jobs, spread new ideas be an engine of economic growth.

Openness: Internet users should have the right to freedom of speech and commerce without gatekeepers or discrimination.

Attendees strategized around these topics, came up with possible solutions that could be taken by municipalities, federal government, business, and citizen groups, and worked toward consensus on a national broadband strategy. Free Press' Tim Karr described it to me as "an experiment in deliberative democracy." While the perspectives of those involved in the meeting were not quite as diverse as needed for the conversation, there were nonetheless a variety of good ideas discussed. One thing that is key is debunking the idea put forward by telecoms that bandwidth is finite and those who use more of it must be sanctioned through greater fees. In reality, the companies are creating scarcity where it doesn't have to exist, and perhaps with incentives to fatten the pipe and increase access, these so-called scarcity issues would melt away, exposed as just an attempt to create a new revenue stream. Not to mention the fact that this artificial scarcity has caused the United States to fall far behind the rest of the world, reduce competitiveness, and become marginalized on the Internet for the first time since its inception. This has major impacts on job creation and countless other issues. For instance, a wired country is a country that can handle expansions in telecommuting, can cut down greenhouse gas emissions through driving and the wasteful use of paper, reduce unproductive time spent waiting for downloads, etc., etc.

The digital divide (only 35% of households making under $50,000 a year have a high-speed Internet connection) is a large impediment to equal participation in society today. Lower-income communities have substantially lower access to the Internet, which impacts education, economic output and political engagement, among other things. As society increasingly ports a fair degree of the tools for civics online, in an effort to be more efficient and inclusive, they are simultaneously shutting out needed voices among communities of color and the poor. Mandating universal broadband would be an update of President Roosevelt's rural electrification policies in the 1930s. It is just as important to economic and social growth to provide access to a free and open Internet for everyone.

Fortunately, we now have a President-elect who understands the broadband issue as an infrastructure issue. In his most recent weekly address, Barack Obama highlighted the need to bring broadband access to every corner of the country.

"It is unacceptable that the United States ranks 15th in the world in broadband adoption," President-elect Obama said in the address. "Here, in the country that invented the internet, every child should have the chance to get online, and they'll get that chance when I’m President -- because that’s how we'll strengthen America’s competitiveness in the world....[and] the economic recovery plan I’m proposing will help modernize our health care system -- and that won’t just save jobs, it will save lives."

Technology leaders have been cheered, not just by the commitment but by the understanding of the issue as one that effects jobs, upward mobility and economic growth. As Sara Robinson notes in a larger piece about investing in America:

Yes, making these investments will create more debt, which in turn will cast a shadow on the health of the American dollar for the next few decades. But if we choose our projects wisely and well, they will create more -- much more -- than enough wealth to enable us to pay those bills. After all, the infrastructure and education investments of the 30s and 40s were the foundation of the tremendous prosperity we saw in the 50s and 60s, which more than enabled us to discharge the debt.

Free-market fundamentalism was wrong in the 1880s, wrong in the 1920s, and wrong in the 1990s, too. Anybody who's still hanging onto that 30-year-old conventional wisdom -- or who thinks balanced budgets are so important that we should sacrifice our entire economy on that altar -- is not only admitting that they're incapable of rational, objective thought; they're also demonstrating that they're too ideologically addled to understand the clear lessons of history, let alone understand what's going on around them now.

It was Keynes's theories that got us out of the last depression; and if we're betting our futures on this (which we are), we'd be wise to follow that course again. Our choice here is clear: Invest in America and get our people back to work; or shrivel up and allow ourselves to become a third world country.

The free speech of the 21st century increasingly depends on a broadband connection. I think we need Internet in the same way we need an electrical outlet in every home. Access is essential to keep this country as an economic leader.

Presidency 2.0

While Barack Obama is likely to have to give up his Blackberry after being sworn in as President (owing mainly to a lack of email security, as well as record keeping under the Presidential Records Act), he will have a laptop on his desk in the Oval Office, a first. And he just finished up the first-ever Presidential YouTube address, which will become a regular feature.



It already has 630,000 views, probably 620,000 more than those weekly radio addresses which air at 4am. The even more interesting development is Valerie Jarrett's address at change.gov, a completely transparent update on who will be leading key agencies, which has NINETY-EIGHT THOUSAND VIEWS. This is a wonky and fairly dull address about ethics requirements and lobbyists, but because it's being made widely available and people are hungering for knowledge about the incoming Administration, it's getting widespread attention.

I find this to be very significant. Obama enters office with 3.1 million donors and an email list of 10 million. How these lists are put to use and allowed to engage with the Administration will signal how much the President-elect will live up to his expression that change begins from the bottom up. By using these Web tools, Obama can bypass traditional filters and deliver action items to his audience on issues can have relevance and immediacy.

"He can do a half-hour YouTube address every Saturday, addressing millions," Trippi said. "The networks would never give the president that much television time each week, but the press is still going to have to cover what he says on YouTube."

Aides say the Obama team will staff a robust "new media" operation out of the White House and plans a complete overhaul of the White House Web site to make it more interactive and user-friendly. On the campaign trail, Obama promised to use the Internet to make his administration more open, such as offering a detailed look at what's going on in the White House on a given day or asking people to post comments on his legislative proposals.

The Internet outreach team includes some really great people, and I'm sure they will push the technology (White House Twitter feed, anyone?) in the years to come. As for this nonsense that Obama has to be careful reaching his supporters in a partisan way, I think that's a deep misreading of his Internet fan base. My personal view is that an overwhelmingly substantial portion of his Web supporters are not just Democrats, but more progressive than he is. And not only that, they are not passive creatures who have to be told what to think and what to support. They were TRAINED in the campaign to be self-starters. It's going to be a bit less about how Obama wants to use these supporters and more how these supporters want to use the technology, whether to support policy or push Obama from the left.

The other very good outcome of a President who gets technology and its promise is that it makes him more likely to sign a net neutrality bill into law. Keeping the Internet open and free helped Obama win the White House - now he can return the favor by ensuring that freedom well into the future. Sen. Byron Dorgan plans to introduce a net neutrality bill in January - I'm hoping the Congress acts swiftly on it.

How Different This Is

There is the obvious, of course, and that's a big deal. Senior citizens who were the sons and daughters of slaves are going to the polls today to vote for the son of a Kenyan for President of the United States. It's extremely unique, and anomalous for the world. In fact, the US is the most likely place for this to happen. Europe has never had an ethnic minority lead one of their countries (Nicolas Sarkozy is the son of Hungarian immigrants, but that's not really what we're talking about), and immigrants are simply not assimilated into the society in the same way. It sounds weird to say it, but this is a uniquely American event.

But believe it or not, I think Adam Nagourney gets this largely right - while the phrase "change politics as we know it" gets thrown around a lot, this election truly has.

It has rewritten the rules on how to reach voters, raise money, organize supporters, manage the news media, track and mold public opinion, and wage — and withstand — political attacks, including many carried by blogs that did not exist four years ago. It has challenged the consensus view of the American electoral battleground, suggesting that Democrats can at a minimum be competitive in states and regions that had long been Republican strongholds.

The size and makeup of the electorate could be changed because of efforts by Democrats to register and turn out new black, Hispanic and young voters. This shift may have long-lasting ramifications for what the parties do to build enduring coalitions, especially if intensive and technologically-driven voter turnout programs succeed in getting more people to the polls. Mr. McCain’s advisers expect a record-shattering turnout of 130 million people, many being brought into the political process for the first time.

“I think we’ll be analyzing this election for years as a seminal, transformative race,” said Mark McKinnon, a senior adviser to President Bush’s campaigns in 2000 and 2004. “The year campaigns leveraged the Internet in ways never imagined. The year we went to warp speed. The year the paradigm got turned upside down and truly became bottom up instead of top down.”

And regardless of whether that is good for Democrats or Republicans (right now, it's Democrats, but that could change), it's good for the country. Political engagement is good for America. It's going to be sorely needed as we meet these enormous challenges, the fallout of the Age of Bush.

What was most different is that, despite the smear campaigns and the attacks, this was quite a substantive election. It was waged on ideological grounds, and while a lot of important issues hardly ever got raised, the core philosophies of conservatives and liberals was fully on display. And so the outcome ought to produce a bigger mandate than in the past. Obama made the argument, and so did McCain. Now the winner can act on it. And hopefully, we will see a citizenry as engaged about governing as they were about the horse race. That is the great challenge for the next President, because only people power will be able to overcome the special interests and the guardians of the status quo.

So go vote. But then on November 5, the work begins.

Don't Call It A Comeback

During the primary, Hillary Clinton reacted to her surprise victory in the New Hampshire primary by saying "I found my voice." That's what's happening this week in the general election.



The commentary is so sharp and the messaging so pointed that the media really is covering it. And Democratic allies, for once, are piling on.

"One Senator -- John McCain -- woke up yesterday morning, surveyed the state of the U.S. economy, summoned the ghost of his fellow Republican, Herbert Hoover, and declared, 'The fundamentals of our economy are strong,'" said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, before laying responsibility for the current woes in part on McCain's economic adviser Phil Gramm.

"I served with Phil Gramm here in the Senate," he said. "The same Phil Gramm who, as a Senator, was responsible for the deregulation of the financial services industry that paved the way for much of this crisis to occur. I like Phil Gramm, I don't like his economics. A respected economist at the University of Texas -- now that's where Phil Gramm taught, in Texas -- a respected economist at the University of Texas, James Galver said that Gramm was, and I quote, 'the most aggressive advocate of every predatory and rapacious element that the financial sector has,' and went on to say he is a 'sorcerer's apprentice of instability and disaster in the financial system.'" [...]

"Since President Bush has been in office, median income for working-aged Americans has gone down by over $2,000 after adjusting for inflation. Family income is going down. People are spending more for food," said Sen. Bernie Sanders. "The cost of gas, of course, is now off the wall. College education costs are up. How does that sound like a situation in which 'the fundamentals of our economy are strong,' according to Senator McCain? And the confusion in all of this is pretty easily understood.

"The truth is," Sanders continued, "that the fundamentals of our economy are strong if you are within the top 1 percent of our country. If you're a million or billionaire, you know what, Senator McCain is right. For those people, the fundamentals of the economy are strong."

I love Bernie Sanders.

The outside groups are starting to help as well, and while they exist on both sides, the fact that ours are playing off of this general narrative about conservative failure on the economy gives them a stronger resonance. And then there's the cultural wallpaper that we're starting to see more frequently, like this Hockey Moms for Truth ad:



Or the Palin Truth Squad:

With today's report that Democrats have "airdropped a mini-army of 30 lawyers, investigators and opposition researchers into Anchorage" to find all the skeletons in Sarah Palin's closet before they come to life and overrun Alaska, the McCain-Palin campaign has launched the Palin Truth Squad to keep America safe from the truth about Governor Sarah Palin, her family, her cronies, and her inexperience. In keeping with the general strategy of the McCain campaign, the Palin Truth Squad will make sure that the truth about Sarah Palin is kept as far from American voters as possible.

"We're nervous about Sarah Palin's record of taking on library books, her ex-brother-in-law, and the atmosphere," said former Governor Jane Swift. "Sarah Palin's commitment to pork is becoming well-known, so we seek to distort the truth about it. We will not allow the left and the media to criticize the only mayor in Alaska who made rape victims pay for their own forensic exams. We know the truth and are committed to making sure that it doesn't cloud the mind of a single American voter."

And there are the #invented hashtag jokes exploding on twitter. You know the "I created the Blackberry" thing has reached a cultural tipping point when the Obama campaign is changing their sigs:

-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Burton
Sent: Tue 9/16/2008 4:07 PM
To: Ben Smith
Subject:

[snip]
--------------------------
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld, a miracle made possible by John McCain.

And even Sherrod Brown is in on it, quipping: "If he invented the BlackBerry, I blame him for having to spend too much time on my BlackBerry and not talking to my wife enough."

The momentum has shifted, in my humble opinion.

Trolling For Fun And Profit

You knew somehow it would come to this. John McCain's campaign is offering their supporters redeemable points to troll websites and write pro-McCain comments. It's the professionalization of astroturfing. Because it's a conservative effort, they give them the exact words and invite them to cut and paste them onto the sites.

Activists and political operatives have used volunteers or paid staff to seed radio call-in shows or letters-to-the-editor pages for years, typically without disclosing the caller or letter writer's connection to a candidate or cause. Like the fake grass for which the practice is named, such AstroTurf messages look as though they come from the grass roots but are ersatz.

McCain's campaign has taken the same idea and given it an Internet-era twist. It also has taken the concept one step further.

People who sign up for McCain's program receive reward points each time they place a favorable comment on one of the listed Web sites (subject to verification by McCain's webmasters). The points can be traded for prizes, such as books autographed by McCain, preferred seating at campaign events, even a ride with the candidate on his bus, known as the Straight Talk Express, according to campaign spokesman Brian Rogers.

Just because I'm hoping they have some of those spare tire gauges, let me give this a shot.

"John McCain has a comprehensive economic plan which rewards personal responsibility and entrepreneurship! Juice!"

OK, where's my prize?

This is just an evolution of the Bush Administration paying Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher to carry water for their policies. It's wingnut welfare at the micro-level. And it's kind of sad that you can't find a conservative who is legitimately excited enough about John McCain to promote him online for free. I think the accurate response to any McCain supporter at this point is "how many buttons did you just win for that comment?"

Surfing With Floaties

John McCain is aware of the Internets, but only dimly:

He said, ruefully, that he had not mastered how to use the Internet and relied on his wife and aides like Mark Salter, a senior adviser, and Brooke Buchanan, his press secretary, to get him online to read newspapers (though he prefers reading those the old-fashioned way) and political Web sites and blogs.

“They go on for me,” he said. “I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don’t expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need.”

Asked which blogs he read, he said: “Brooke and Mark show me Drudge, obviously. Everybody watches, for better or for worse, Drudge. Sometimes I look at Politico. Sometimes RealPolitics.” (it's RealClearPolitics -ed.)

At that point, Mrs. McCain, who had been intensely engaged with her BlackBerry, looked up and chastised her husband. “Meghan’s blog!” she said, reminding him of their daughter’s blog on his campaign Web site. “Meghan’s blog,” he said sheepishly.

Getting online requires a double-click on the browser application. I don't necessarily need a President to be able to install the DSL system or a universal broadband card, but the double-click seems to me like a pre-requisite.

Also interesting - in Washington, Drudge rules even the computer illiterate's world. As well as mini-Drudge.

I apologize in advance for demeaning McCain's peerless, impeccable service to our country.

We Win One

This is a significant victory for those of us who desire a free and open Internet:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The head of the Federal Communications Commission said Thursday that he would recommend that Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company, be punished for violating agency principles that guarantee customers open access to the Internet.

The potentially precedent-setting move stems from a complaint that Comcast had blocked Internet traffic among users of a certain type of file-sharing software that allowed them to exchange large amounts of data.

“The commission has adopted a set of principles that protects consumers access to the Internet,” the commission chairman, Kevin J. Martin, told The Associated Press late Thursday. “We found that Comcast’s actions in this instance violated our principles.”

That's George Bush's FCC Commissioner, just so you remember.

At the Save the Internet blog Tim Karr calls this a win for organized people over organized money. Clearly Comcast tried everything they could to prevent accountability on this, including stacking open FCC meetings with sleeping seat warmers. Ultimately, common sense and the principle of net neutrality prevailed.

But it needs to go beyond principle or even precedent and become codified into law. Virtually every Democratic Senate challenger supports the concept of net neutrality and legislation like the Internet Freedom Preservation Act, so we'll have more votes in the Senate for this after November. For now, let's leverage this victory.

Old Man McCain

Hey, I'm not the one making the slur (the RNC tells me that calling someone "old" is a slur, now), take your beef to the American electorate.

The top 10 answers people volunteered when asked to describe presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama, according to an Associated Press-Yahoo News poll released Monday. Included is the percentage of people who gave each answer. More than one response was allowed.

John McCain:
1, Old, 19 percent
2. Military service, 9 percent
3, Record, qualifications, 8 percent
4, Bush, 7 percent
5. Strength, 7 percent
6. Insider, politician, 7 percent
7. Iraq, terrorism, 6 percent
8. Honest, 5 percent
9. Republican, 5 percent
10. (tie) Moral/good and dishonest, 4 percent

When the guy admits that he can't use a computer, it tends to typecast him as from a different generation. But many people of advanced age, in fact the majority, happily use technology in their lives and have kept up with the times. I wouldn't call McCain old, I would call him retrograde. And such thinking is actually dangerous for the country.

And where is McCain on tech policy? Not so shockingly, the computer-free senator's campaign is not as plugged in as his rival's. In fact, his campaign website fails to address America's lagging performance on broadband access or affordability, the technological capabilities of the federal bureaucracy, or the Internet's ability to increase government transparency. "There are red flags," says Brian Reich, author of the book Media Rules!: Mastering Today's Technology to Connect With and Keep Your Audience and the former editor of Campaign Web Review, a blog that tracked the use of the Internet by candidates, campaigns, and activists.

Barack Obama has embraced the Internet, with his thunderous online fundraising and sophisticated MyBO website. (Plus, he's comfortable talking about what's on his iPod.) Unsurprisingly, high-tech leaders hail his comprehensive tech policies.

It's a major problem. America has fallen behind in broadband capacity, has failed to use the promise of technology in areas like health care and government transparency, is in danger of deleting the concept of network neutrality that would stunt innovation, and has generally seen its advantage on technology and the Internet wither. A tech policy is not just about tax breaks for the industry, it's about implementing and utilizing technology. And McCain opposes net neutrality on the advice of CEOs looking for another revenue stream:

I asked her about McCain's opposition to so-called network neutrality, proposed government rules that would prohibit Internet service providers from charging websites for faster delivery of their content. McCain is on the side of the cable and phone companies, which argue that the rules would squelch investment in new broadband networks. Obama has been a big supporter of net neutrality, a huge issue among online activists that adds to his Internet buzz factor, leading some (OK, it was us) to ask if Obama is a Mac and McCain a PC.

Fiorina said McCain understands the importance of the Internet and sees government-mandated net neutrality as a hindrance.

"There's no question that it is to our economy's benefit to have more Internet access, more broadband capability, to have this country more wired, so to speak, as we move forward.... I think John McCain understands the way to get that done effectively is by principally allowing business to get it done as opposed to a big government-mandated program. And business won't get it done unless they see sufficient return on their investment."

That's just a huge lie, which isn't surprising for Fiorina, a failed executive and professional liar who wants us to think that 23 million businesses make over $250,000 in sales when in actuality it's about 5% of that number. Net neutrality has brought untold wealth to this country and almost single-handedly created the tech boom of the mid-1990s. The incentive for telecoms to increase broadband capacity is opening up its customer base, which will make them plenty rich. Discriminating on content will make the Internet less popular, more stratified, and would funnel money to Fiorina and her pals.

McCain probably doesn't have a coherent answer on this at all. He's too busy finding the "ON" switch.

Our Unbelievably Stupid Culture

So the fundamentalist American Family Association has a news site that filters every AP story, changing the word "gay" to "homosexual," because... well, I don't really know, but in their twisted minds using the word "gay" is hiding homosexuality.

This is how we got headlines like this today on their site. The track and field star being discussed in these headlines is named Tyson Gay.



Sigh. Days like today really make me want to stick my head in a bucket of cold water for a month. The stupid does burn so.

Shorter Old Man Yelling At Cloud

Let's get this straight: John McCain is not only aware of the Internet, he is aware of all Internet traditions.

Man, someone could make a name for themselves just following McCain around asking him about Rickrolling and all your base is belong to us.

I also agree with Yglesias and others that in the Age of Information, not knowing how to use a computer is almost disqualifying for a world leader.

UPDATE: A visual:

Barack Opts Out

Prepare for howls and shouts of "no fair, this means you'll have more money than us!" from the right upon this news.

Hi, this is Barack Obama.

I have an important announcement and I wanted all of you – the people who built this movement from the bottom-up – to hear it first. We’ve made the decision not to participate in the public-financing system for the general election. This means we’ll be forgoing more than $80 million in public funds during the final months of this election.

It’s not an easy decision, and especially because I support a robust system of public financing of elections. But the public financing of presidential elections as it exists today is broken, and we face opponents who’ve become masters at gaming this broken system. John McCain’s campaign and the Republican National Committee are fueled by contributions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs. And we’ve already seen that he’s not going to stop the smears and attacks from his allies running so-called 527 groups, who will spend millions and millions of dollars in unlimited donations.

Not that they'll stop, but it's hard for the McCain campaign to criticize this. They can talk about promising to participate in the public system and then opting out, but that's exactly what McCain did for the primary - illegally, to boot. They can talk about runaway spending in elections, but Barack just essentially added $80 million to the federal treasury. They can talk about asymmetrical warfare, but they'd get tripped up by the "money is speech" argument they've been pimping for years.

I believe in public financing, but Barack is right, the system is broken and easily gamed, and to ask him to unilaterally disarm and not rely on the strength of his movement of ordinary people for the sake of principle is absurd. I believe the idea of a "parallel public financing system" where the public and not special interests actually do the financing is another solution to the problem, and actually might get Republicans on the side of traditional public financing just so they can keep pace. At any rate, you can't throw an advantage like Obama would have down the river. This means that every swing state that's even a remote challenge is going to get massive resources. If Obama loses, it won't be for lack of cash.

This doesn't happen without the Internet, and the speed with which Obama caught its potential and used it to build a movement.

Oddly, McCain's already up with ads in some swing states, while Obama is dark. He now knows that the money will come in, so I would hope that he gets something on the air as soon as possible.

It's A Big Internet And Everybody Wants A Piece

If the Associated Press thinks that restricting their content is going to result in a successful business model online, they might want to give The New York Times a call. They discontinued their protected content because they knew they were losing money in the long run. Information on the Web wants to be free, and you end up making more money for yourself and your member publishers by allowing the excessive linking of the blogosphere to raise your traffic. If you restrict that in any way you're just going to end up having bloggers like me stop linking to you entirely. And while I'm small potatoes, others aren't, and having the whole political Internet avoid the AP isn't going to do a lot for their bottom line.

Now this story is somewhat different. Time Warner, Comcast and AT&T are toying with charging customers through "Internet metering," making their highest-bandwidth users pay the freight, just as electricity customers pay for usage. That's not necessarily out of bounds, as long as some content (like that brandished by the service provider) isn't prioritized over others. But it is an old model of how ISPs have dealt with content, most similar to AOL's pay for service in the 1990s. That stagnated competition then and is sure to do so now.

The real importance of net neutrality is not so much to protect people from discrimination, but to create rational incentives for a better, more efficient Internet in the face of capacity constraints.

To back up, one benefit of capacity constraints (for now) is that they create demand for a solution. Indeed, the way we “solve” this problem will determine the future of the Internet.

For instance, in a world of access tiering, companies have less of an incentive to increase capacity – that’s because scarcity will have been built into the business model. For that reason, a world of access tiering will depress innovation and be less receptive to new, data-intensive applications/services. Thus, in this world, companies would solve the capacity problem by assuming more control and increasingly relying on bandwidth scarcity for revenue.

If, however, companies had to be content/application neutral, different solutions would necessarily emerge. Companies would be forced to build more capacity or to find better ways to compress data. There would also be greater demand for solutions from “the edge” – i.e., individual companies and entrepreneurs (e.g., BitTorrent) would have more incentives to create new data-compression techniques. And, frankly, I have more faith in the collective mind to develop these new services than say Comcast and AT&T.

Adding to this, I'd say that those companies who don't have the money to innovate would see less traffic because their service would be necessary costlier. And it would lead to the service provider delivering a lot of the video and high-bandwidth content in house. Furthermore, allowing charging for bandwidth is a slippery slope, and I simply don't trust the telecoms to take only one bite of the apple.

The sick thing is that there's plenty of money to be made off the Internet, by the AP or Time Warner or whoever, but it's greed that's driving these decisions.

Taco Trucks And The Future Of California

I know that we're going to have a historic new Speaker today, and tomorrow the Governor is going to prevent a revised budget that will set the course for the next few months in the Legislature. But for the moment I want to talk about taco trucks.

Los Angeles County has enacted rules basically banning the taco truck, the rumbling restaurants on wheels serving Mexican food to lunchtime office workers, day laborers and others throughout the city, particularly in East LA. The previous order by the County Board of Supervisors was to force taco trucks to move every hour or face a $60 fine. Most trucks paid it as the cost of doing business. Now the supervisors have upped that fine to as much as $1000 and possibly jail time.

Make no mistake - the taco trucks are being harassed because restaurants don't like the competition. As one truck owner said, "We are hard workers and we pay taxes... we are poor people feeding other poor people." In a rare moment of perceptiveness, Dan Walters noted that this is a "new chapter in an old and dreary story of political interference with the economic aspirations of low-income and/or immigrant Californians." The restaurant lobby is maybe not as powerful in LA as in San Francisco, but it obviously had enough juice to eliminate their competition in this case. Walters folds this into a stupid argument about how all business should be unregulated, but in this case he's right - if you want to offer the opportunity for the new and struggling in our society to experience upward mobility, barriers like this are really restrictive and unnecessary.

Taco trucks are about more than a meal in Los Angeles - they truly are a culture, and one that has migrated onto the internet. The Great Taco Hunt, a blog dedicated to the LA taco scene, has a loyal following. People will drive many miles for a decent taco here, and given the traffic that's a real commitment. So some residents are fighting back. Save Our Taco Trucks has also 6,000 signatories to a petition to rescind the law, which goes into effect on Thursday. Tomorrow, they're holding a final event at Tacos El Galuzo to raise awareness about the ordinance and share one last legal taco.

You can see the stirrings of how politics will be waged in the save-the-taco-trucks movement. There has been a wave of local organizing this year, around the Presidential race, around the budget, around proposed education cuts and park closures, and even around hyper-local issues like the taco truck. This is a new era for California, where technology reduced barriers to communication and allows those with like interests and concerns to find one another. When the Board of Supes takes down this silly ordinance - and they will - they will have seen the power of modern organizing.