McCain, Obama & the Future of Comm Policy

Rather than taking an activist approach to governing communications, Laura Phillips, a partner at Drinker Biddle & Reath in Washington, D.C., said a President McCain likely “would suggest that the government would have to prove some regulation ... is needed.”

As for Obama, because he has limited communications and telecom policy experience he might end up relying “on the old guard,” which includes prominent names from the Bill Clinton era, said Clausen. As a result, he said, Obama's treatment of communications could resemble "more of what you saw in the Clinton administration," referring to policy moves promoting competition and tighter oversight.

The Illinois senator’s interest in having small entrepreneurs and startups get into the communications and technology businesses also speaks to his more pro-competition view, said Phillips, who practices in Drinker Biddle’s government and regulatory affairs division and works on telecom and mass media issues.

“His general thrust is to ensure that there are various avenues to competition,” she said. “One of the only ways you can do that is [to] create an environment where competitors can emerge.”

Obama would indeed “be more interventionist in the market place,” added Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a nonpartisan think tank. “On the plus side, if you will, Obama’s administration would be more willing to have a proactive national broadband policy and not just rely on market forces acting on their own.” While that might sound like good news to some, not everybody is gung ho on this idea. Only 18.3 percent of executive respondents to a June 2008 Pike & Fischer survey said the government should establish such a policy. Nearly 45 percent said market forces would be sufficient to expand broadband availability and adoption.

Sonia Arrison, a senior fellow in technology studies for the free-market think tank Pacific Research Institute, sums up affairs this way: McCain's greatest weakness is lack of transparency in government. Despite that, he "looks better positioned than Obama on issues that matter most to innovators in the tech community," Arrison wrote in an Aug. 22 TechNewsWorld column. Arrison wasn't available for an interview and directed xchange to the editorial. "Obama, on the other hand, has multiple weaknesses, particularly when it comes to taxes, property rights, labor and government waste that harms America's tech sector."

Gear Heads

The implementation of federal tech policy will fall in large part on the new president’s advisers and the person named to lead the FCC. Both Obama and McCain employ well-known communications industry names.

Obama’s prominent tech advisers include Larry Strickling and Bill Kennard. Strickling was an FCC bureau chief from November 1998 to July 2000; he also worked for Allegiance Telecom. “Just the fact that Obama has him involved in the campaign says volumes,” said Clausen. “If Obama wins and Larry is rewarded with some position at the FCC, I think you’d find a very open-minded individual who is leery of abuses or mindful of possible abuses.”

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