Michael Arrington has a post going live at 9:00am that reports on his talk with the much reviled ex-HP CEO on her new position with...the Republican National Committee.
Senator McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, has twice this month embraced technology leaders in his push to become president. On March 7 Carli Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett Packard, joined
the Republican National Committee as Victory Chairman. And on March 15 Meg Whitman, the outgoing CEO of Ebay, became McCain's campaign co-chair.
[snip]
I spoke to Fiorina last week for thirty minutes about her new position with the campaign and the party. We spoke both about specific policy issues where McCain either hadn't fully worked through his policies when we spoke, or where I wanted additional clarification (net neutrality, mobile spectrum auctions, China and H1B visas, specifically). The interview is up at TalkCrunch, and embedded below. The transcript of the conversation is also copied below.
Here are some choice quotes:
MA: If you look at the pure statistics, Barack Obama has done such a good job in getting friends and followers on the social networks and getting individual people to donate small amounts of money mostly on the internet. What are your plans, and I know its early still, but what are your plans in the near future to counter that and push McCain forward in those spaces as well. Do you have any specific ideas yet?
CF: It is too early for me to talk specifically about how were going to use the social networking sites although there are people thinking about that on Lou Eisenberg's team. But what I would say is, again, every opportunity to communicate with people is an opportunity to ask for their contribution and as Barack has demonstrated small contributions can make as big a difference over time as big contributions, so nothing is too small. I would also say that it will be a focus of this campaign to go after young people more aggressively than we have to date. We need to broaden the appeal of the party and John McCain by making more diverse audiences aware of who he is and what he stands for and so you're going to see John McCain reaching out to different members of the community than perhaps people would expect and you'll see me doing that as well. MA: I've been very pleasantly surprised with Senator McCain. I spoke to most of the presidential candidates and so I got a feel for how they address Sillicon Valley and also social networking crowds, and when McCain was on the phone with me we spoke at length, he had a very laid back personality, obviously not all the time, but on the phone with me he was and very comfortable talking about technology even though he's not a regular computer user he said. But he seems comfortable with the issues and also comfortable reaching out to even the youngest voters.
She doesn't get it. If she'd been at SXSW or even Politics Online last week she'd understand that the power of social media isn't "connecting with younger voters," it's allowing them to communicate your overarching message in a P2P fashion while allowing you to keep the message top-down. Patrick Ruffini made a great comparison of Obama's social networking strategy to Bush-Cheney's "neighbor to neighbor" program. The GOP would probably get a better deal hiring him than Fiorina.
How much of a kiss-ass is Arrington? He's so enthralled by talking to her that he throws her more softballs than Sara Lacy. He lets her totally soft-peddle the China issue, which by the way even Mark Zuckerberg did a better job of handling than she does. He totally lets her evade the issue and cites outdated export control regulations as "unreasonable interference." Those days are gone, buddy. Remember the Apple "supercomputer" ad? Well, we buy lots of "supercomputers" from China now...they're called Thinkpads, idiot.
She also managed to demonstrate a total ignorance of the complexities of dealing with tech issues on the Hill despite her considerable experience, in calling for a total hands off approach in allowing companies to assist totalitarian regimes in their repression of speech on the Internet, and even manages to take a swing and insult the late Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA).
MA: Thats an interesting segue into some of the technology issues that we've addressed with the candidates and I'd love to get your take on a few of them as well as the policies are finalized for Sen. McCain. When I spoke to McCain he had some preliminary policies in place on a number of issues and they certainly make sense particularly with regard to his politics and generally speaking Republican politics, particularly how they handle financial issues and the markets and regulation, tend to work very well in Silicon Valley with a hands off approach. There are some issues that have come up more recently that in particular I'd love both your personal feedback on it and how the party will eventually go with this, that maybe don't work quite so well and at least some people in Silicon Valley are calling for maybe a little bit more handholding by the US government. For instance, in China many US companies do business in China, either selling hardware to China which is ultimately used (some of it) to monitor their own population with the firewall there, or in the case of the search engines like Google and Yahoo and Microsoft actually setting up corporations there and providing services directly to Chinese citizens, but they're all working under Chinese laws and in some cases as I'm sure you're aware with Yahoo actually handing over personal information to the Chinese government that can be used in ways that some of us find reprehensible. Sen. McCain, we didn't talk a whole lot about China other than he wanted to take a tough stance with them over time, but specifically I guess the question I have is do you think there should be limitations on what US companies can do in working with the Chinese government?
CF: First let me say that I'm about to express my own opinion, and while I feel fairly comfortable that McCain and I are aligned on most things I haven't had this specific conversation with him, so I want to be sure I'm upfront in saying I'm expressing my opinion...
MA: And by the way I'm very interested in your opinion, long time Silicon Valley executive, you know these issues like the back of your hand.
CF: Well thanks. First, I do not think it is in American interest to preclude American business' from doing things that other businesses will do any way. For example, if the Chinese government can get technology or agreements from France or Russia or India and our government puts limitations on the American business communities' ability to provide those same products or enter into those same agreements, that puts us at a competitive disadvantage, and I've taken that stand on the Hill for many many years. We need to be able to compete with everyone else in the world and the reality is that the Chinese can get whatever technology they want somehow. Because the truth is that little tiny microchips that sit in your BlackBerry are as powerful today as stuff that was a lot more expensive and a lot more complicated ten years ago, as you well know. However, I do think it is totally legitimate for the US government to say, "you know what as a member of the WTO, you actually have to abide by the rules and we're going to inspect and expect your compliance to those rules." I think it's totally fair for the U.S. Government to say, "We expect transparency, we want to know what you're doing with this stuff, and we'll hold you accountable - hold you accountable in the ways that we can." So I do think there's a legitimate role for government but I don't think the role should be, "Let's prevent American businesses from doing business in China because we are afraid of what they might do with it." And by the way I guess I would just say again as a personal matter, I think Yahoo! got the message loud and clear when poor Jerry Yang had to go up on the Hill and talk about what he'd done. I think that was a very impactful experience for him as a chief executive and for that company.
MA: Representative Lantos said, "Morally you are pigmies" and Representative Smith compared Yahoo to Nazi collaborators in World War II.
ed. note: Rep. Lantos was a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust, and knew more about tyranny and repression than anyone on the Hill, even former POW McCain.
CF: I think that language was way, way, way over the top and I do not mean to condone that language in any way because I think it was just totally inappropriate. But I think the opportunity for a company that sells to consumers to have to explain their positions to consumers in transparent terms is appropriate.
MA: You know it's funny I actually agree with you. I've been criticized because China is the one area where it's truly gray area that there is some bad stuff going on, but do we really hobble US companies when there are European companies ready and willing to jump in and fill the void?
Actually, Michael, Europe is actually more willing to take a hard line on China. Name a company that makes alternatives to many of our technologies that we've sold them? I dare you. There isn't a French Cisco or Google out there. Mark Zuckerberg did call it a "grey area" but he's not ready to sell out and open an Chinese version of Facebook, because he has a conscience and doesn't want to degrade user experience OR give their government another way to lock people up, like Yahoo did. Lantos wasn't over the top. You're just so enthralled by talking to Carly that you give her a pass. Get a room.
Next up, he lets her bad-mouth the Wireless Open Access provisions that FCC Chairman Martin (R) has imposed on the 700mhz auction. She goes on and on about how much money the government made when it was a free-for-all, despite the total disaster it turned out to be (has she even heard the word NextWave?) and obviously has never read books by two of the Commissioners (Reed Hundt's "So You Say You Want a Revolution?" and Harold Furchtgott-Roth's "A Tough Act to Follow?"
MA: The 700-Mhz spectrum auctions that are going on right now under FCC Chairman Martin were hugely debated last year with Google pushing the issue in particular by saying, "We need a change in the way mobile is handled in the US. And in particular, whoever owns this spectrum has to allow third party applications. They have to allow people to switch their handsets and service providers. They have to lease out their service to other businesses that want to provide their own services on top of that at fair rates." The FCC came back and took a lot of this, and I think Chairman Martin, to his credit, really pushed for this. But some of the people that work with him may have been a little bit more conservative on the issue. But it seems like maybe we haven't gone far enough. And I wonder what your personal opinion is on handling, in particular, mobile spectrum allocations and what kind of playing field do we create for the companies doing business there? And AT&T has been lobbying to say the government should be hands off, and that's fine, but these are effectively virtual monopolies once they've been allotted, and so a hands-off approach can sometimes lead to bad situations like I believe we have with mobile today. This is another one where Senator McCain was a little bit standoff-ish on this position, and I'd love to get some feedback from you on what do you think we should do there?
CF: First of all, again it's my personal opinion and it's a fascinating topic, and I think Senator McCain at this junction has just been focused on other issues. But I grew up in the telecommunications industry. I joined AT&T way back when it was Bell Systems in 1980. That's how I know I'm much older than you are. And what's going on with these mobile spectrum auctions reminds me of the fight that has gone on with landline infrastructure all along. And you know what the parameters of that fight are. The folks who are making the investments in building out the infrastructure want an opportunity to get a reasonable return on that investment. And the folks who are trying to put applications and services and features on that infrastructure want to get at it as cheaply as possible. That's the tension.
MA: Just to address that point: Google has argued that, sure, there's clearly a huge capital outlay that needs to be put in place to deliver a service. But a big part of the cost is paying for the allocations themselves upfront and clearly the government will make more money (as they did in '94) by obviously putting fewer rules on these allocations, so do you really think - and you obviously know more about this than me - do you really think that not allowing these restrictions could actually cause companies not to put enough capital into the networks?
CF: First of all, I certainly agree with you that excessive regulation is never a good thing. But what's worse for a business is an uncertain regulatory climate. So if you are a company and you're having to make a decision to outlay billions of dollars, the worst thing for you is to not really know what the environment is going to be 2, 3, or 4 years from now. And so in the absence of certainty and predictability, folks who are investing in infrastructure are going to say, you know what, I want as much protection around my investment as possible because I don't know what's coming in the future. And so I think If we could create an environment - of course this is very difficult because it's a politically charged subject - but if we could create an environment where investors could say "I understand the environment I'm going to be investing in, and it's going to be predictable and stable," then I think you would have an opportunity to lower some of those barriers. In the absence of certainty, investors will say "I want the maximum protection of my investment." And companies like Google will say, " I want the maximum access so that I can serve my customers as cheaply as possible."
MA: A related issue is net neutrality, which is such an obscure topic for most of America but it's a big touch point, as you know, in Silicon Valley. The Republicans seem to be on the side of stand off on the issue until we clearly see something go wrong. The Democrats, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are saying, hardcore, go at it, enact legislation to say net neutrality is law, and that's just the way it has to be. Do you think there's room on the Republican platform to take a more proactive approach ensuring a level playing field to all service providers? CF: I think there's room on the platform. I'm not making a prediction...
MA: I led you right to where I wanted you to go...
*gag* I'm done with this.
Given Ms. Fiorina's previous acrimonious business ventures, problematic mergers and reputation as a "strong woman" I wonder if she's being brought in to possibly counter the image of another "strong woman" or two on the Democratic side.
Here's the real question: is Michael Arrington the Katie Couric of tech blogs?
