Frank, last month I began an odyssey into policy development for telecomms. For excitement, it's right up there with watching paint dry, and it's taking forever.
But there have been a few surprises. One of them was a study which concluded that in the United States, simple advocacy was unlikely to be either persuasive or effective in changing the status quo.
The oft-quoted EU "policy" developed multilaterally. It certainly wasn't - and isn't - monolithic.
John Blundell's article says EU policy-makers don't understand the technology, and their jargon is impenetrable.
He makes a few other points that are debatable. Overall, the alarms he is ringing about the European Commission may be justified - but only so far as Parkinson's Law (does anyone remember?) applies to bureaucracies.
In fact, the very steps he says the Commission will advocate are contravened by other aspects of policy - specifically, the generally accepted concept of Freedom of Access to Information.
To pick the most obvious example, I doubt very much that the Swedes would be compliant to such measures.
"The EC is the enemy of the spontaneous, the voluntary and the competitive. It is socialism made flesh."
More than anything else, that statement reveals the bias of the writer. Europe has its problems, as do others. Nobody's cornered the market on Good Policy, yet. Or Bad Policy, for that matter.
I'm not sure there's a real concern here.
Jim |
