Q: Can you describe the background of The Progress & Freedom Foundation and how its policy role has evolved in recent years?


A: The foundation grew out of discussions which Jay Keyworth and I had in 1989, where, frankly, we were suggesting a path for the Hudson Institute, which we were both involved with. Hudson chose a different path, and it has done very well with that, but the niche which we thought that we had identified -- a digital think- tank -- remained empty.

I then went off and ran Newt Gingrich's political-action committee, which was less famous then than it is now, and came back to Jay in 1992 and said, "The time is now." The niche is still empty. We need to create this digital think-tank. So, beginning in 1993, that is essentially what we have done. Our focus is on the impact of the digital revolution and its implications for public policy. That is the broad focus for us.

A big part of this is telecommunications policy, in the sense that we see the telecommunications or the digital revolution, technologically, as a catalyst for a lot of other changes in society -- the way the economy works and ultimately, probably last but not least, the polity. So what we seek to do is to identify areas whereby looking at public policy through the lens of the technological revolution, the digital revolution, we can bring a different perspective to bear and hopefully catalyze change ourselves in those areas of public policy that need to change.

Q: From this perspective, what are the issues that you see are long overdue for change and what are the issues that are looming on the horizon -- issues that government at all levels, really needs to start thinking about?

A: There is a book which I think is fundamentally wrong in its basic thesis, but has an interesting chapter, called Cyberslog by David Shank. It essentially portrays the digital revolution as a libertarian plot designed to accomplish a lot of policy goals that Libertarians and Republicans have been seeking for many years.

I think this is perhaps a perverse way of looking at a phenomenon that is nevertheless real. The digital revolution, as we have learned, is a tremendous force for decentralizing power, for empowering individuals, smaller institutions and local communities as opposed to empowering large centralized bureaucracies of any kind.

So as we look at the public policy arena we built through the Industrial Revolution -- and John Kenneth Galbraith identified it and named it brilliantly in his 1967 book, The Industrial State -- all the lessons we learned through the Industrial Revolution led to the creation of a large centralized state. That is present in virtually every area of public policy, some more than others.

The most important cutting-edge issue, really, is to turn the digital revolution free to allow the telecommunications technology and digital-connected computing to develop, because that is catalyzing so many other changes in society. As you go further into the public policy milieu, what you find is essentially everything will have to change -- the way that we provide Social Security, for example. Social Security meets a very real need in society.

The need is to ensure that people don't forget to save some money for their retirement so we then won't have to deal with the moral crisis of what to do with them when they get old. We need to have a solution to that. But that does not necessarily mean we need a "one-size-fits-all" plan run by the federal government called Social Security. There are other ways of accomplishing that which are a lot more consistent with the digital revolution and personal empowerment.

Q: We at Government Technology write a great deal about how different agencies