COMPUTING RESEARCH POLICY BLOG

Declan McCullagh has an interesting piece at CNET News.com that describes the some of the difficulties Congress has trying to regulate technologies it doesn’t really understand. In their efforts to regulate things like peer-to-peer clients, spyware, and chat clients, members of Congress often cast their net way too broadly, drafting bills that would affect far broader swaths of the internet than they perhaps anticipated. Most of this, McCullagh argues, is because the members lack the expertise required to understand the implications of their legislation on technology. It’s a quick read, and I think it does a good job of demonstrating how important it is for groups like CRA, ACM, IEEE-CS, etc, to continue to offer to serve as resources for members when confronting technology issues.

I’ll be at the House Committee on Science hearing today on high performance computing and the committee’s bill, the High Performance Computing Act of 2004. White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director John Marburger will be testifying, in addition to Irving Wladawsky-Berger, VP of Tech and Strategy for IBM and former co-chair of PITAC, Rick Stevens, of Argonne Nat’l Lab, and CRA Board Member Dan Reed, of UNC.
The hearing will be webcast live beginning at 10:30 am ET. The webcast will then be available online at the Science Committee website.
I’ll have a full report after the hearing.