The future’s Internet and technology governance

The future of cyberspace direction, development, standards and laws, constantly grab my attention. My time at PureVolume and the challenges we faced running one of the original social media/social networking websites, with an emphasis on legal distribution of mp3’s, certainly sparked this curiosity. Now and moving forward, web technology needs attention and well laid-out plans for governance. To keep the web on course we need flexible laws and a centrally based, accountable, non-government separate entity for global oversight. Robert Scoble, the well known technical evangelist, and Lawrence Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons and professor of law at Stanford University, have had a similar discussion in response to Barack Obama’s brilliant technology policy vision. Scoble champions the idea of having a nationally appointed CTO; but he doesn’t articulate this appointment’s need to be a separate entity, much like the Federal Reserve. It is imperative that such governance is collaborative with all government branches but also independent. Unmitigated government intervention would lead to rash security provisions and in turn a drop in creativity and innovation. In five years time, I would love to be at the forefront of such discussions.

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