Reboot the White House says Tech Policy Summit

27 Mar 2008 | 13:47 GMT

By Sylvie Barak

THE CRÈME DE LA CRÈME of tech society have borrowed Hollywood for the their annual Tech Policy Summit which opened yesterday.

The event brings together all the high-profile technologists, public policy makers and academics who come to discuss such heady subjects as globalisation, immigration, the use of airspace, the protection of intellectual property and the price of skinny lattes.

It all started out with a fair amount of Bush bashing to get the summit into the swing of things. The soon-thankfully-to-be-no-longer President was given a fair amount of stick for having let American technology slide compared to the European and Asian industry. Many techsperts even put the president’s failings down to pure technological incompetence, and called for the next US president to be more tech savvy.

Executive vice president of external affairs at One Economy, Alec Ross, for example, told of his company's labours to bridge the digital divide when they asked the White House if they would float the idea of broadband for public housing. According to Ross, he was knocked back and told that high-speed Internet connections were not essential, and considered a tool only for entertainment. Ross reckons that all the president had to do was sign an order and it would have happened.

Others like Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum and a co-founder of the popular site techPresident, were a lot more blunt in their criticism of the Bush administration, saying "We need a complete reboot of our entire system of governance."

But some disagreed and argued that the President may not have been as bad for Tech as others would like to point out. One such techspert, Tony Perkins, founder and editor of AlwaysOn, technology magazine said that Bush had openly supported the push for more H-1B visas, which would effectively open up US immigration, something for which Silicon Valley has long been lobbying. µ

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