Sidecut Reports

A planned tech policy “smackdown” became a one-handed backhand Thursday morning, when a representative for John McCain’s campaign failed to show, apparently with no explanation or reason to the event organizers.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the chief economic policy adviser for Senator McCain’s campaign, was a no-show at the Technology Policy Smackdown staged by Wired magazine and the New America Foundation, leaving former FCC chairman Reed Hundt alone to expound on the tech-policy ideas of the candidate he advises, Sen. Barack Obama. According to statistics on the accompanying webcast, 205 viewers stuck around anyway to hear Hundt talk about Obama’s plans to quickly improve the country’s overall communications infrastructure.

(more updates as we listen in)

UPDATE: In an odd one-handed debate format, Hundt did the best he could to not take cheap shots at the nonexistent McCain tech policy and did a great job of explaining some of the nuances of Obama’s tech policies. One very strong point Hundt made was that unless there was some significant investment in broadband infrastructure, it will be much harder to effect an economic turnaround — since broadband will be so critical to the economy of the future.

Harold Feld adds his on-the-scene reactions. Including the obligatory dig at Holtz-Eakin’s claim earlier this fall about how McCain helped invent the BlackBerry — a claim about as credible as the McCain campaign’s no-show at Thursday’s debate.

Great post from Glenn Greenwald over the weekend, adding up the figures to find out that AT&T, Comcast and Verizon have spent $13 million on lobbying so far this year, partly to help Congress see its way clear to offering the providers amnesty from the FISA lawsuits they are facing.

It’s a longish post but there is good stuff at the bottom too, about prospective Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s ties to — surprise! — lobbyists from the telco arena. Guess which way McCain is voting on amnesty.

It apparently wasn’t quite at the level of having members of Congress call high-tech leaders moral pygmies, but Cisco nevertheless got slapped around a bit at a Senate Judiciary hearing Tuesday, with a Cisco exec publicly apologizing for an old product presentation slide that touted the ability of Cisco networking gear to help “Combat Falun Gong evil religion.”

Putting aside the Cisco explanation — it was a low-level employee who did this, we’re shocked and appalled, etc. — don’t be surprised if you see more questions from Capitol Hill about how advanced networking gear may be assisting other governments in their attempts to control their citizens’ Internet usage. While the report quotes Cisco senior VP Mark Chandler asserting that “any employee who tailors its [Cisco’s] routers to help governments monitor or censor Internet activity is in violation of the company’s code of ethics,” a Democratic-controlled Judiciary committee may not want to put a lot of trust in the company’s self-policing efforts.

“The subcommittee has received some troubling information about Cisco’s activities in China,” Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin was quoted as saying.

Don’t think politics is a part of this? Don’t forget that Cisco CEO John Chambers is BFF with probable Republican candidate John McCain.