Many years ago, I was the staffer for a Senate subcommittee that had jurisdiction over government data collection. When I would visit the Chairman's home state (which staffers do a lot), I would be called upon to explain to people, mostly farmers, why they needed to fill out all this government paperwork. Why did the government need to collect all this information? It was just a useless nuisance, they would complain. Fast forward 25 years to this story in the New York Times - "Agriculture Department...

We live in a global economy and society built on our investments in computer and network technology. Our connectedness—our ability to work and communicate easily with those outside of our borders–is the foundation of our digital economy. Policymakers are increasingly recognizing that the free flow of information online is important both for promoting democratic values (see Secretary Clinton’s remarks last year on Internet Freedom) and for promoting commerce (see the Department of Commerce’s Internet...

Continuing comments on the questions posed by the Commerce Department's Competitiveness study RFI (see here, here, here and here), we turn to a cluster of topics and questions concerning knowledge creation and dissemination. The questions posed in topic #1 (government R&D) and #5 (incentives to innovate) can be taken together.  Topic #1 - Government research and development - asks the following questions: How can the economic impacts of basic research funding (e.g., NSF, NIH) be better measured...

As Yogi Berra said, "It's deja vu all over again."  A new report is out about the Internet which raises the concern over a digital divide.  As the Washington Post story ("Survey of online access finds digital divide") sums it up: "A first-of-its-kind federal survey of online access found that Americans in lower-income and rural areas often have slower Internet connections than users in wealthier communities."This new survey of internet usage, Digital Nation: Expanding Internet Usage, was released...