All I want for Christmas is a sign of technological sanity

It’s been a crazy year. Since the world didn’t end last Friday, you’re probably reading this on Christmas Eve, 2012 — a year in which blinding technological advancement confronted willful technological ignorance and legislative dementia yet again. This yin and yang has ruled the past several years, it seems.

Thus, I’ve decided that all I really want for Christmas is a soupcon of logic and sanity. You can drag those notions around to every party in town and find a different application, but since this is InfoWorld, where the topic is always technology, I’ll settle for technological and scientific sanity. There are hordes of items on that list alone, but some are more important than others. Feel free to add your own.

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An end to the big ISP cartel The sins of the ISPs have been the theme here for three weeks, so I might as well start there. We need something to dispense with the status quo of lagging broadband development in the United States. Kick the bums out, incentivize competition, or regulate — any mix or match of those actions may do the trick. We can’t wait any longer, hoping that Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, and the rest are going to step up to the plate. It’s time to hold their feet to the fire.

Rational thinking on the copyright infringement mess The RIAA and MPAA have been suing the bejeesus out of file sharing services and other online properties over perceived losses due to copyright infringement for a decade now, but it hasn’t really changed anything. The recent rise in calls for ISPs to become traffic cops on the Internet is a tremendously slippery slope and yet another example of the hubris displayed by these entities as they continue their quest to buy enough legislation to prop up their ancient business models. It hasn’t worked, and it won’t work. They’re even starting to eat their own. Case in point: the noise surrounding Dish Network’s commercial-skipping Hopper device.

It’s as if the TiVo were never invented, and we haven’t been abandoning scheduled TV shows in favor of on-demand or time-shifted television for the past 10 years. That ship has already sailed, and companies that actively attempt to force their viewers to go backward in time will find themselves in rough shape in the coming years. It’s long past the point of losing the schedule and embracing the anywhere-anytime format of the future.

An end to software patents A while ago I said (in jest) that some company should patent the act of filing patents and the act of filing infringement lawsuits, then sue every other company out of existence. Never has that seemed to be more possible than now. These patent battles are so ridiculous, and they’re hamstringing innovation all over the world. The world came together and figured out how to play nice with the likes of date and time standards, not to mention chemical and nuclear weapons. Maybe we can figure this one out too. How hard could it be? [Cue eye roll.]

A semblance of scientific and technological literacy in government Yeah, I know — good luck. However, it wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time there was the Office of Technology Assessment that actually worked to provide Congress with objective and accurate research on technological issues. Naturally, in 1995, with the United States gearing up for the most massive technological revolution in history, Newt Gingrich and his cronies mothballed the office. Since then, technology and general science have had no objective voice in the U.S. government, and instead, we wind up with an 89-year-old chairman of House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology who’s also a climate change denier.

It’s never been more important for our elected representatives to have at least a smidgen of a clue about technology and specifically computing. They need to be advised by impartial, highly knowledgeable people, not lobbyists who themselves are only lightly technical in nature. We’ve built the entirety of modern civilization on computers and computer networks, and there’s absolutely no excuse to continue to send technically ignorant people to Congress. That’s how we’ll wind up losing our technical edge to other countries and, with it, a sizable portion of our economy. Oh wait, that might already be happening.

Full-on, no-nonsense, Net neutrality Enough said. This means no interference whatsoever on data traversing a network: no tiering, no compensated prioritization, no protection rackets, nothing more than today’s status quo, though it seems that many ISPs are already playing shady games. The Internet needs to be free and unfettered from central controlling interests. Otherwise, it turns into a fragmented collection of quasi monopolies, kind of like the current ISP/content owner conglomerates.

That’s it really — a short list for this year. Maybe next year we can work on other important stuff, like throwing the doors open on the amount of Internet usage data being collected, by whom, and for what ends. I can dream, can’t I?

This story, “All I want for Christmas is a sign of technological sanity,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Paul Venezia’s The Deep End blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.