Tony Blair had more than one special relationship across the Atlantic
So farewell, then, Tony Blair. By the end of this week, we shall all be sick of hearing eulogies to your tenure at No 10. But, loath as I am to add to the din, Blair's technological legacy cannot pass without comment.
A week after new Labour took office in 1997, a computer beat a world chess champion for the first time. That year was the first year the BBC covered elections on the web. In September, Larry Page and Sergey Brin would register the domain name google.com. In December Jorn Barger would coin the term weblog.
It's inevitable that a leader who presided over ten years of unprecedented progress in digital networks, over two dotcom booms and one dotcom bust, should be associated with some sort of trend in public-technology policy. But new Labour's technical choices have something about them that is truly Blair's.
At the heart of them lies a special relationship - because the Blair premiership has been characterised by not one but two transatlantic love affairs: the first with the most powerful man in the world, and the second with the richest, Bill Gates. In 1999, just after the two-finger-typist Prime Minister had admitted his technical illiteracy to the electorate, the Microsoft CEO flew over for a visit, to talk e-commerce. And in 2001, Blair practically launched Windows XP in the UK when he and Cherie visited Microsoft's offices in Reading to announce the new Labour business manifesto, and received a ten-minute demo of the new operating system on the eve of its release.
It was in that year that Gates inspired Blair to begin the doomed NHS IT project. And it is this project that will define Blair's failure to grasp the true potential of technology for social change. Instead of harnessing new opportunities for decentralised activity across networks run on open standards - the properties that so define the internet and the worldwide web - Blair, like Gates, chose proprietary technologies and traditional hierarchies. The result is a system that does not put its users first and that has question marks hanging over its security record - a system, in short, whose only hope of success is in giving the market place no other choice but to use it. Sound familiar?
But will Gordon Brown, or the Conservatives, fare any better? The Tories have made promising noises about the revoking of a centralised ID system and about the use of open-source software in public projects, but until they are in power and subject once again to the ideological capture of Big Tech, one would do well to remain sceptical. Brown is slightly more promising - the Treasury's Gowers review of intellectual property paid significant homage to the open-source model.
Then again, in the same year as he commissioned the Gowers review, Brown put Bill Gates forward for a knighthood.
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