Rich Atkinson

Politicians of the world, please take notes. Many lessons can be learned from what The Obama team has already done right.

Take for example the technology agenda.

“President Obama and Vice President Biden understand the immense transformative power of technology and innovation and how they can improve the lives of Americans. They will work to ensure the full and free exchange of information through an open Internet and use technology to create a more transparent and connected democracy. They will encourage the deployment of modern communications infrastructure to improve America’s competitiveness and employ technology to solve our nation’s most pressing problems — including improving clean energy, healthcare costs, and public safety.”

I don’t see anything as lucid, transparent and detailed coming from Australias own confused leadership.

It’s well established that Senator Conroy’s Internet filter plan is technically in conflict with his other major policy, providing 12MBps Internet to the bush via a Government funded National Broadband Network.

Here, Iljitsch van Beijnum (Arstechnica) rather eloquently describes how the Australian Internet filter plan actually misses it’s policy target by a rather embarrassing margin.

“Here’s an idea: if the Australian government actually finds child porn, nuclear bomb making manuals, and the like on the Internet, why not do their best to find the perpetrators and put them behind bars? That way we get to keep our free speech and have less crime and terrorism, rather than less of the former without actually reducing the latter. Then again, imposing restrictions on what local taxpayers can do is a lot easier than tracking down and rounding up international criminals and terrorists, and the filtering plan is moving forward despite the massive and fairly obvious drawbacks.”

Read the whole article…