Silicon Valley Is In DC's Crosshairs… And Silicon Valley Still Hasn't Realized It

Politics

from the time-to-wake-up dept

I didn’t cover last week’s “net neutrality” vote in the Senate, because the whole thing was silly showmanship. You had a totally toothless FCC rule that was designed by the telcos to benefit the telcos, and the actual Congressional debate was merely a partisan food fight that had absolutely no parallel to reality or actual network technology. The whole thing was a farce, no matter what happened. But, as Stacey Higginbotham writes over at GigaOm, the whole net neutrality food fight is just one example of many of how Washington DC has decided to turn its regulatory eye towards Silicon Valley. Between this, the spectrum fight, SOPA and a few other ideas smoldering through Congress, as Stacey notes, it’s:

a frightening reminder of how easily the folks in Washington, D.C. can throw a wrench in the gears of innovation

Of course, as Silicon Valley has done for years, we mostly ignore this kind of stuff. In general, the tech world tends to believe that innovation happens best when politicians stay away, and we’ve tried to accomplish that by ignoring politicians. However, the politicians aren’t ignoring us. The cynical viewpoint on this is that the tech and internet sectors are basically the only real bright spot in today’s economy… and with the way DC corruption works, they need to tap into that market for campaign donations. What’s the best way to do that? Well, propose a bunch of awful regulations that will massively hinder innovation and the startup economy. In the hive mind of DC, that’s how you wake up folks to start contributing to campaigns.

Whether or not that’s the actual thinking behind this rash of bad legislation, all aimed at the innovation sector, one thing has become clear: cynical or not, the startup world can’t continue to ignore DC. Stacey notes:

While people in the Valley are playing at building companies and technology, the folks in D.C. are playing at politics, and when those worlds collide, its likely technologists that will lose.

That’s only true if we let DC play the politics game as usual. But we have an advantage. While we tend to dislike the entire DC/political circus, we are innovative and we are disruptive. It seems like it’s about time to turn that innovative and disruptive spirit towards DC, rather than pretending we can continue to ignore what’s happening there.

Filed Under: campaigns, fund raising, lobbying, silicon valley, washington dc