I’m glad you’ve found this needle in the Internet’s haystack, and hope you’ll come back on a regular basis, add us to your RSS reader, comment on our posts, and submit posts of your own if the spirit moves you. We’ll do our best to make High Tech Forum worthwhile for you.

We live in a world that’s increasingly dependent on the Internet and the various broadband networks, wireless and wired, that make the Internet run. If you’re a politician running for office, an entrepreneur starting a new business, a Hollywood mogul filming a movie, or a thinker with a compelling analysis to offer, one of the first things you do is stake out a presence on the Internet. If you have a question about your health, your diet, your car, your child’s homework assignment, or the World Cup, you probably turn to the Internet for its answer before you go any further.

Given our dependency on the Internet and its member networks, it’s not surprising that it’s increasingly the focus of regulation and advocacy. High Tech Forum isn’t going to answer the policy questions that define the parameters of regulation and advocacy, however: we’re not going to spell out the answers to policy questions, tell you who to vote for, or otherwise weigh into the policy debate. Policy questions depend, in large part, on political philosophy and economic analysis, areas in which there are no objective answers. Rather, we want High Tech Forum to be an honest broker of technical information about networking, information technology, the Internet, and applications. We don’t believe that technical information of the type we want to deliver will answer policy questions, but we do believe that the better grounded the participants in the policy debates are in the essential aspects of technology, the more likely they are to develop policies that actually deliver on their genuine goals and objectives.  Those with experience in legislative process are all too familiar with well-meaning laws that fall short of delivering on the aims they seek; this generally comes about because the science that the law was based on wasn’t right. So we want to inform and illuminate, not to influence but to enlighten.

High Tech Forum is an independent project, not related to my employment at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, where I do policy work. I’m simple an editor/contributor here, not an overlord. I encourage technical people who are able to explain technology to the bright but unschooled audience to contribute. High Tech Forum is an open forum for factual information about technology. If you have technology insight and a desire to share, please contribute. The flow of insight  commences directly.