The Gap Has a Champion

Around the time I first launched this blog, I wrote A Champion For the Broadband Gap in which I speculated (hoped really) that XMission founder Pete Ashdown might use the Internet as a wedge issue against incumbent Orrin Hatch.

Well, he dood it.

There's a new legislative proposal up for net neutrality with a lot of friends and heavy-hitters signed-off on it. (Naturally, I wasn't asked to sign. Hey, they got standards.)

Look whose name is listed at the top (because it starts with an A). Pete Ashdown. He's listed by his corporate title, but it's the same guy you'll find here, running for US Senate against ol' Orrin (I write bad country songs and demand you pay for 'em) Hatch.

Hatch is the worst Senator imaginable on open source and Internet issues. He is a creature of the proprietary assumptions of the past, believing that ideas are like land, that monopolies are sweet, and that government control of what people think is what makes them free. If Joe Lieberman were running against Hatch, I'd be for Lieberman.

So now the broadband gap has its champion. But questions remain:

• Will Ashdown hammer on this issue?
• Will Internet and open source advocates get behind him?
• Will Ashdown be able to put Hatch into the kind of trouble Lieberman now faces?
   

Hope so. Hatch going down is a long shot, perhaps the longest shot on the electoral map. But from the point of view of Open Source Politics, and Internet Values, taking him down would be sw--eeeet. It would put a Net Lamont victory in the back of the paper.

But that's how electoral revolutions happen, with longshots.