In an appearance on CNBC Friday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt took himself out of the running to be the Obama Administration’s promised chief technology officer, so we can stick in fork in that really bad idea. Asked by host Jim Cramer if he’s interested in the job Schmidt said, “I love working at Google and I'm very happy to stay at Google, so the answer is no.” Thank goodness for that.

As a technology adviser to candidate Obama and now a member of the transition economic team, Schmidt (and Google) already clearly has the president-elect’s ear. Given the scrutiny the Obama Justice Department will likely need to apply to Google, the relationship is already problematic. Formalizing it, even with Schmidt resigning his position at Google, would only make things messier.

Schmidt’s demurral, however, has only fueled the giddy speculation in the blogosphere about other candidates for a job that, at the moment, has little more substance than Obama’s vague campaign promise to appoint an administration CTO to…well, he wasn’t very specific about that.

Among the names being floated (although not by anyone in the Obama camp): Larry Lessig, Vint Cerf, Ed Felten, Bill Gates, Julius Genachowski, Shane Robison, Sonal Shah, Jeff Bezon, Reed Hundt and William Kennard.

All of whom, Media Wonk imagines, are smart enough not to take a government job that, at this point at least, doesn’t come with a clear bureaucratic portfolio. That way lies four years of grip-and-grin photo-ops with science-fair winners.

The presumed tech-friendliness (and known “socialistic tendencies”) of the Obama Administration has also fueled fantasies in some quarters that copyright—and in particular DMCA—reform is in the offing.
Michael Hatamoto of cdfreaks.com points to Obama’s statement during the campaign that “we need to update and reform our copyright and patent systems to promote civic discourse, innovation, and investment while ensuring that intellectual property owners are fairly treated.”

All such speculation is just fantasy football at this point. With two wars, a deep recession and the collapse of the global financial system to deal with, there are far-more pressing claims on President Obama’s political capital. Tech and IP policy are falling further down the priority list with each down-tick in the employment data. So let’s not get carried away.

Any action on the copyright front, in particular, will come from Congress, not the Administration.
Here’s something useful the Obama Administration could do, however: It could, through the appointment of a new FCC chair, filling the CTO job, even naming the new White House IP czar (officially a coordinating, rather than policy-setting, job, but since it’s a new position we’ll assume some flexibility in the portfolio) set a tone that encourages genuine policy-making, in the public interest.

All too often, in the specialized realms of technology and intellectual property, “policy-making” in Washington consists of getting the incumbent corporate interests into a room to cut a deal, then taking that deal to either Congress or the FCC for formal blessing.

Public interest groups sometimes manage to force or cajole their way into the room during the discussions, but the process is the same: the deal becomes the policy.

Often overlooked in that process are any broader cultural, political, scientific or democratic issues that are inevitably at stake when setting communication, media and information policy in a free society.

If the Obama Administration were to foster and encourage a more open, public-interest oriented policy process that aspired to more than simply splitting the difference between entrenched economic interests, that would be change Media Wonk could really believe it.

Paul Sweeting

Paul Sweeting is the Editor of Content Agenda, a business-to-business brand dedicated to the nexus of content, technology and business. This piece was originally published on Paul's blog "Media Wonk" on Content Agenda and is posted on DMW with the author's permission. 

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