Does Change.gov Indicate Real Change for Internet Law?
Change.gov. This website—the president-elect’s new space for providing transition and policy information—is a symbol of the new age ushered in by President Obama’s election in 2008. Newspapers make the claim that he is younger and “hipper” than previous presidents because he lives on his Blackberry and will probably be the first to have a computer in the Oval Office, but the transition website is a sign of true change.
Why, you may ask? At the most immediate level, Change.gov promises to bring accountability and openness to the White House. Through the site, President-elect Obama asks the American public for ideas and participation, and provides them a forum to interact with one another as they comment on policy and provide feedback. This creation alone should be lauded as a breakthrough in American politics.
However, many groups have praised Change.gov for an entirely different reason, one worth examining in of itself: its use of a Creative Commons Attribution license. With this license, the Obama transition team has given the American public the freedom to copy, share, and even remix the website’s content as long as they attribute the work to its original source.
As seemingly unimportant as this policy might seem, Obama’s use of Creative Commons is a powerful symbol of the changes to come once he takes office in 2009. Where government was once closed, opaque, and slow-moving, it is now open, transparent, and innovative. Under President Bush, a policy suggestion site would have been unimaginable—could we imagine Bush or Cheney or Karl Rove listening to public input on national security or Iraq?—but today, it has already occurred. Moreover, the President-elect’s rapid embrace of a (relatively) new concept like Creative Commons represents his willingness to transform policy in arenas previously ignored, such as copyright law on the internet.
Hopefully, Obama will follow through on this promising start once he takes office in January. Only time will tell. In the hopes that he will, in fact, focus on Internet law (he has promised to appoint a Chief Technology Officer, which could help guide him in such a complex and rapidly-changing field), we have created a blog that provides suggestions for his administration.
Over the next few weeks, “The Internet Ahead” will discuss some of the key issues that the Obama administration will face in cyberspace. Although the blog couldn’t begin to cover every issue that needs to be addressed in the upcoming years, we will discuss in depth some of the most salient topics of Internet law. During his campaign, President-elect Obama personally addressed some of these issues—for example, Net Neutrality—and has put forth ideas for policy change. Other topics such as online privacy he has not directly addressed. Regardless, we will examine the various sides of each issue that his administration will face; then, we will recommend a particular course of action that will best ameliorate the problems that exist today. By doing this, we hope to open a dialogue on the importance of Internet law to our country’s future in a rapidly-changing world.