> National Chief Technology Officer. Most corporations hired a CTO, Chief Technology Officer, not long after taking pencils and paper off employee desks and wiring the workplace. Better late than never, the U.S. government will finally seat a cabinet-level Tech Guru. President-elect Barack Obama is in the process of appointing the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer.

> Big Push for Universal Broadband Internet Access. Two important decisions occurred on November 4, 2008: (1) The first tech-savvy U.S. president was elected. (2) The Federal Communications Commission ruled that White Spaces – unused portions of the wireless spectrum – are not owned and controlled by a handful of broadcast and telecom companies.

> Tech Savvy 1: Marc Andreessen – Netscape founder, Facebook board member, pioneer Silicon Valley geek – was asked to meet with a stranger at the San Francisco airport back in February 2007. Andreessen said the stranger was “like a guy in a garage thinking of taking on the biggest names in the business” who was proposing the impossible – combine the power of online social networking with aggressive database development. And beat overwhelming odds. As Andreessen saw it: “We see a lot of that (crazy ideas) out here (Silicon Valley) and then something clicks.”

The click echoed to the White House: The stranger, Barack Obama, had just thrown his long-shot hat into the presidential ring. Though he’ll surrender his BlackBerry when he walks into the Oval Office January 20, 2009 (Federal e-communications security rules), Obama will be the first Internet-savvy CEO of the United States. Long before, he’d already set out his attitudes and tech policies. Which is why the FCC opened up White Spaces to their owners, the American public.

> Win One for All: Advocates of Net Neutrality (the Internet should not have different speeds, tollbooths or roadblocks depending on how much you pay to ride the superhighway) and Broadband Access (expanding inexpensive, high-speed Internet access to everyone in America) were natural enemies of large telecommunications and cable companies that became broadband monopolies over the past 20 years. No surprise that Open Internet Access folks also wanted to crack open unused White Spaces on the broadcast spectrum — space that can bounce broadband Internet access through mountains and buildings, across cities and rural areas. Cheaply.

Open Access advocates squared off against the powerful National Association of Broadcasters, who wanted to hoard the White Space spectrum for commercial use. See Chicken Little Lobby Comes to New York from this Blog in October. Finally, the FFC ruled on November 4, 2008: Open Access Won.

> Now We Catch Up. Bruce Kushnick — 25-year telecom analyst, chair of a customer advocacy group, director of New Networks market research – noted how far U.S. consumer Internet access has fallen from top of the mountain back in the 1990s:

U.S. share of worldwide Internet traffic has shrunk over the last decade from 70 percent to 25 percent. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) ranks the U.S. 15th out of 30 leading industrial nations in per capita broadband use. And Americans are getting poorer broadband telecommunications services — lower bandwidth — and paying more than citizens in most other advanced industrial countries.