Very good news about the federal government’s commitment to technology this weekend: the Obama transition team named Michigan Law professor Susan Crawford and Wharton professor Kevin Werbach, both strong advocates of net neutrality and expansion of broadband availability, to the review team for the FCC. (Prof Werbach even has a blog.)
I got my start in technology, and that’s still part of my responsibilities as a consultant. I joke that I’m one of the few people who gets paid to read Gizmodo every day. Having worked in technology everywhere from a national high-energy physics lab to educational institutions to call centers, I can attest that increased broadband adoption is really critical to our nation’s competitiveness in the global market, as is net neutrality. The access I had to the Web at school in my tiny rural town made all the difference in gaining job skills; the fact that my home region was fairly quick to adopt technology in the classroom across the board probably has something to do with its strong position in providing IT services to businesses now, ten to fifteen years later.
So I’m definitely excited to see this. Hopefully there will be more appointments like this to come — there have been rumors that the Obama team may name a cabinet-level technology czar, which would be huge. Stanford Law prof Larry Lessig would be my choice, but as you can imagine, I don’t get a vote on the matter. 
Read the full article: The new administration and net-neutrality