NYTimes on Bush and Techno Legacy

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

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From: Bradley Malin <malin () cs cmu edu>
Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2005 09:43:25 -0500
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: NYTimes on Bush and Techno Legacy

http://nytimes.com/2005/01/23/business/yourmoney/23techno.html

Bush Didn't Invent the Internet, but Is He Good for Tech?
By JAMES FALLOWS

Published: January 23, 2005

GEORGE W. BUSH probably won't be remembered as "the high-tech
president." The strongholds of the biotech and infotech industries, on
the East and West Coasts, voted against him. If his State of the Union
address next week, his fourth, is like the previous three, it will say
next to nothing about the role of science or advanced technology in the
nation's economic and social future. The symbol of Al Gore's
relationship with gizmos was the early-model BlackBerry he wore on his
belt. The symbol of Mr. Bush's was his tumble from a Segway computerized
scooter in 2003.

Yet the Bush administration could end up being known for some technology
advances that occurred on its watch. I am speaking not only of purely
private developments - the renaissance of Internet-based businesses in
this age of Google - or of the heavy public spending for military and
surveillance systems, which is creating a vast new
antiterrorism-industrial complex.

Instead, as in many chapters of American technological history, some of
the most significant innovations have been made where public and private
efforts touch. In its first term, the Bush team made a few important
pro-technology choices. Over the next year it will signal whether it
intends to stand by them.

There is a long historical background to the administration's choices,
plus a variety of recent shifts and circumstances. The history stretches
to the early days of the republic, and the idea that
government-sponsored research in science and technology could bolster
private business growth. Progress in farming, led by the land-grant
universities, demonstrated this concept in the 19th century. Sputnik-era
science, culminating in the work that led to the Internet, did the same
in the 20th century.

In the last two decades, this old idea has been dressed up with concepts
like "network economics" and "increasing return to scale." The results
include the widely accepted understanding that the relationship of
public science and private business is more important than ever. An
environment in which the exchange of information is timely and
inexpensive, rather than slow and costly, can foster the growth of many
industries.

That sounds obvious. But it has political consequences. For one, it
helps explain why the United States has been so fertile an incubator for
tech companies, compared with most of Europe: government-sponsored
information has been much cheaper here. (The United States government
sells a CD set containing all weather readings taken in the last 50
years for $4,290; the German government data costs $1.5 million.)
American dynamism also creates an ever-changing set of winners and
losers. In fostering many new companies, the government often dislodges
a few old ones; dealing with the resulting protests is each
administration's problem.

During President Bill Clinton's first term, the Office of Management and
Budget issued a bold new document on balancing these interests. Although
it reeked of "bridge to the 21st century"-style futurism, it had
actually been prepared and approved by the previous Bush administration
and was released under President Clinton virtually unchanged. The
document was called O.M.B. Circular A-130, and its crucial argument was
that the government should distribute information as quickly, as broadly
and as cheaply as possible - technically, "at no more than the cost of
dissemination" - and that it should do so via the most modern channels
available. Of course, that meant the Internet.

The Clinton-era information wars followed. Mead Data Central, then the
owner of Nexis-Lexis, had enjoyed an exclusive contract to distribute
data from S.E.C. filings, at steep prices. After a lawsuit and a change
in policy, that filing data became available free, over the Internet.
Struggles with other companies, with similar results, occurred in the
Patent Office, the I.R.S. and other agencies.

When the George W. Bush administration arrived, it faced a choice.
Should it dump the A-130 policy like other detritus of the Clinton era,
sparing more companies disruption like Mead's? Or should it push ahead,
because of the assumed benefit of free information to the economy?

In general, and perhaps surprisingly, it kept pushing. Compromises were
struck and adjustments were made - and information with any conceivable
link to the "war on terror" was locked up tight. A continuing struggle
concerns when and how the results of publicly funded medical studies
should be made freely available - a subject for another day. But for the
most part, the federal government acted in the spirit intended by George
H. W. Bush and put into effect by Mr. Clinton.

One of the most important and contentious struggles, mentioned here last
spring, appears to be turning out in a way that will burnish the Bush
administration's pro-tech record. This is the "fair weather"
controversy. The question at its core is whether the National Weather
Service, which uses taxpayer funds to collect nearly all weather
readings, will be allowed to make its information available through the
Internet - or instead required to sluice it all to commercial weather
services, as the S.E.C. once did with Mead.

The famous Circular A-130 argued strongly for Internet distribution, as
did a special study of the question by the National Research Council in
2003. The weather service went ahead with such sites - and they have
proved enormously popular. During the three months last fall when four
hurricanes struck the South, weather service sites received nine billion
hits - breaking a government record of six billion hits on NASA sites in
the three months after the Mars rover landing last spring.

 From an interest in aviation, I often visit the weather service's
marvelous Aviation Digital Data Web site, at
adds.aviationweather.noaa.gov. Without a doubt, it has saved many lives
by making it easy for pilots to understand where the dangers from icing,
thunderstorms and turbulence are. Last fall, the government invited
public comment on the weather service's new strategy and received
overwhelming support. Just after the election, the service announced
that it would officially embrace an open-information policy.

BUT the Commercial Weather Services Association, the industry's trade
group, has complained that such sites violate an agreement from the
pre-Internet era. By their argument, the taxpayers should continue to
pay for all the weather balloons and monitoring stations - but should
not be allowed to get the results directly from government sites.

"We feel that they spend a lot of their funding and attention on
duplicating products and services that already exist in the private
sector," Barry Lee Myers, executive vice president of AccuWeather, says
of the weather service. "And they are not spending the kind of time and
effort that is needed on catastrophic issues that involve lives and
property, which I think is really their true function."

He added that the weather service might have done a better, faster job
of warning about the southern Asian tsunami if it had not been
distracted in this way. Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of
Pennsylvania, where AccuWeather is based, has supported the industry
group's position. A spokesman said Mr. Santorum would introduce
legislation to "help" the weather service "continue providing
meteorological infrastructure, forecasts and warnings, rather than
providing services already effectively provided by the private sector."
In other words, taking down those Web sites that the stealth High-Tech
Administration has helped create.

James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly.
E-mail: tfiles () nytimes com.

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