On Wednesday, we honored Larry Irving, Ambassador Bill Kennard, Ambassador Karen Kornbluh, Ira Magaziner, and Michael Powell as digital policy pioneers at our event “Enabling the Internet: A Conversation with America’s Digital Policy Pioneers.” Each of these individuals made important contributions to that led to the exponential growth and the Internet’s rapid emergence as a tool for communication, information access, global commerce and social networking. PPI brought them together on one stage to continue our ongoing conversation about how government can collaborate with private enterprise to take advantage of technology as a major engine of the U.S. economy.
These leading architects of U.S. digital policy, looked back to the early debates and key decisions over Internet regulation, and forward to the modern challenges of data security and privacy, international governance, the advent of the “Internet of Everything,” and national firewalls abroad. Larry Downes, the panel’s moderator, guided the conversation by asking the panelists to describe the challenges they faced in the first days of the “information superhighway” and extrapolate how those lessons might be applied to the decisions facing policy makers today at home and abroad. A consensus was built around the principles of bipartisanship and the idea that legislation of new technologies should always lead with “do no harm.”
2013 Digital Policy Pioneers: Ira Magaziner, Ambassador Karen Kornbluh, Larry Iriving, Michael Powell and Ambassador Bill Kennard
