Barack Obama, self-confessed BlackBerry addict, will undoubtedly be the most tech-savvy president in history. But being tech-savvy isn’t the same as being tech-smart.

The combination of Obama in the White House and new leaders of key tech-related committees in Congress should send warning flags up for all who cherish the freedom and vitality of the Internet.

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) is the incoming chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over the technology sector. Waxman-like Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee-is a strong proponent of so-called “net neutrality.” Despite its innocent-sounding moniker, net neutrality is hardly neutral.

A federal law mandating net neutrality would strip Internet service providers (ISPs) of the ability to control how they manage Web traffic over the broadband infrastructure they developed, built, own, and market to the public.

Read the full article by James G. Lakely in News Blaze here.

The U.S. has gone from “leader to laggard” in broadband rollout and adoption during the past eight years under Republican President George Bush, said Senator Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, speaking Tuesday at a forum hosted by Silicon Flatirons, a tech law center at the University of Colorado, held in conjunction with the Democratic National Convention in Denver.

In early 2004, Bush called for broadband to be universally available across the U.S. by 2007, but that hasn’t happened, Rockefeller said at the technology forum, which was webcast. “Despite all the rhetoric about improving Americans’ access to broadband, the Bush administration never made achieving their goal a serious matter,” he added. “Why? For starters, deploying broadband is really hard work.”

While several other speakers at the forum joined Rockefeller in calling for a more aggressive broadband rollout policy, others at the event questioned if the U.S. was as behind other nations in broadband adoption as some studies have suggested. Commonly quoted statistics from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which rank the U.S. 15th among its 30 member nations in broadband adoption per capita, ignore several factors, said Michael Katz, an economics and business professor at New York University and former chief economist at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

Read the full story in the PC World here.