Obama Visits Google, Unveils "Innovation Agenda"

Barack Obama, one of the top Democrat candidates for President in next year’s election, visited Google yesterday and talked about his technology industry platform, among other things. You can read them in depth here, but the bullet points are:

• Ensure the Full and Free Exchange of Information through an Open Internet and Diverse Media Outlets


• Protect the Openness of the Internet


• Encourage Diversity in Media Ownership


• Protect Our Children While Preserving the First Amendment - Obama will create Public Media 2.0, a sort of PBS for the internet age


• To ensure that powerful databases containing information on Americans that are necessary tools in the fight against terrorism are not misused for other purposes, Barack Obama supports restrictions on how information may be used and technology safeguards to verify how the information has actually been used.


• Obama supports updating surveillance laws and ensuring that law enforcement investigations and intelligence-gathering relating to U.S. citizens are done only under the rule of law.


• Make government data available online in universally accessible formats


• Establishing pilot programs to open up government decision-making and involve the public in the work of agencies, not simply by soliciting opinions, but by tapping into the vast and distributed expertise of the American citizenry


• Requiring his appointees who lead Executive Branch departments and rulemaking agencies to conduct the significant business of the agency in public


• Restoring the basic principle that government decisions should be based on the best-available, scientifically-valid evidence and not on the ideological predispositions of agency officials.


• Lifting the veil from secret deals in Washington with a web site, a search engine, and other web tools that enable citizens easily to track online federal grants, contracts, earmarks, and lobbyist contacts with government officials.


• Giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days before signing any non-emergency legislation.


• Bringing democracy and policy deliberations directly to the people by requiring his Cabinet officials to have periodic national online town hall meetings to answer questions and discuss issues before their agencies.
  TechCrunch has thoughts on these points and how they affect the Web 2.0 world.

  Obama isn’t the first presidential candidate to appear at Google. Check out Ron Paul, Bill Richardson, and

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