In the iconic ending of the 1972 film The Candidate, Robert Redford, just victorious in his Senate race, turns to his staff and asks, “What do we do now?”

If the polls tell us true, a lot of new members of Congress and their staffs-in-waiting are going to ask this question late on November 2. The Republicans have avoided specifics, especially about who might be losers in their victory, because, in conventional (and correct) political wisdom, providing specifics creates targets for attack and diverts attention from the message of the other side’s incompetence.

Therefore, it behooves those of us with an interest in ITC (Information/Technology/Computer) issues to have an answer to Redford’s question, and to be ready to tell the winners what they should do now.

So here are some suggestions, written from our joint perspective as longtime denizens of the free market think tank world. We make no claim to originality; all of these ideas are floating around.

In sifting candidates for our proposed ITC agenda, we have applied five filters:

1) The item must be good for America. We generally hold to the view that what is good for America is good for ITC, and what is good for ITC will help America, but the connection must be clear.

2) The agenda should eschew anything that looks like a plea to “just subsidize us.” For example, while the ITC companies can no doubt agree that the government should spend more on academic and government research, and perhaps this is a good idea, they must recognize that elite institutions of all kinds are under suspicion, and that any agenda that asks for government money without adding credible proposals for reform of these institutions are, and should be, treated derisively.

3) Agenda items must be specific. No calls for abstractions or for vague and unspecified plans or strategies.

4) The agenda must reflect the mood of the Tea Parties, which is one of great faith in American civilization combined with great skepticism about the current functioning of American institutions, especially political institutions, but extending to such other elite bastions as the press and the universities. The recommendations must sidestep this controversy by focusing on unleashing the genius of the people, not on empowering the government or its dependents.

5) The agenda should avoid parroting industry or think tank talking points. (See the recommendation on net neutrality below.) Where strong interests conflict, the focus should be on addressing the prisoner’s dilemma deadlocks that prevent cooperation and synergism.

Here is a list of proposals that survive these filters:

• Remove the barriers to repatriation of profits earned overseas. We need that money to be available for investment and job creation in the United States, not forced into permanent exile.

• Make the R&D tax credit permanent. (This avoids the “no subsidy” filter because it recognizes that R&D is, and must be, a leaky expenditure that produces public goods as well as private benefits, and the tax credit is a way to support R&D while still leaving decisions in the invisible hands of the free market.)

• Reform immigration policy, starting with H-1B visas and employment-based green cards, to encourage the best and the brightest throughout the world to work in the United States. Current barriers prevent thousands of foreign graduates from U.S. universities with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics degrees from contributing to the U.S. economy.

• Ratify outstanding trade agreements and defend free trade generally. The solution to global imbalances is to improve our own performance, not to handicap others.

• Increase the availability of spectrum to ensure that mobile broadband can continue its remarkable advances. Freeing up spectrum from less valued uses is critical. This requires the reallocation of excess capacity reserved by the U.S. government for agency use, and improved market mechanisms to transition broadcast television bands to higher-valued uses.

• Reverse the funding and regulatory imbalance by which the government forces every student into the round hole of a conventional four-year or two-year college curriculum, no matter what shape peg the student happens to be. We need a wide diversity in approaches that allows for trade and vocational education, private educational institutions, and life-long learning, not just conventional college.

• Recognize as a chimera the assumption that the United States will produce “knowledge” while other nations produce actual products. We need to reduce barriers of all kinds to the production of actual things. (Note: This avoids the “no generalities” filter only because it specifies a goal.)

• Make effective use of existing ITC to a) improve government efficiency and eliminate waste (see the recent Technology CEO Report One Trillion Reasons) and b) continue and increase existing efforts to make government information available to the public in usable forms.

• Our system of intellectual property protection was created under very different technological conditions. We need a clean-sheet revision of copyright law to reflect the modern ITC era, one that protects creators while making works broadly available and lowering transaction costs, and we need a break in the deadlock over patent reforms. We need government action to create effective registries of IP rights, and to make orphan works available.

• Net neutrality: The debate has become a tiresome exchange of abstractions. We are personally opposed to Federal Communications Commission regulations requiring net neutrality, but our side has not adequately addressed the concerns that have given rise to the pressures on the agency. The fundamental problems are that the providers of the products and services that use the Internet fear that the ISPs will have sufficient market power to extract the entire producers’ surplus from their efforts. They also fear that the ISPs, as large bureaucracies, will resist innovation. The ISPs fear being turned into commodities and starved of the resources needed for continuing investment and innovation, and being barred from the adoption of new and better business models. Both sets of concerns are legitimate, but it is virtually impossible to craft a general set of regulations that deal with them at a general level. The Verizon-Google proposal points the way to the a viable solution: an overall statement of objectives and principles, combined with a sort of common-law case-by-case approach by the FCC within a framework of an agreed-upon statement of the issues.

• Other systems: The ITC revolution is intertwined not just with the companies that produce ITC goods and services but with other systems as well, such as the retail revolution of big boxes and boutiques; the rapid delivery systems vital to online ordering (such as the U.S. Postal Service, UPS, and FedEx); and the electronic funds transfer payment systems. All these need protection against raids by special interests.

• The policy of making energy expensive needs to be reversed; we should focus on making it cheap. We should confess to the uncertainties about climate change and avoid irrevocable commitments while the issue is examined, and restore honesty to the research system.

The floor is open. Additions? Deletions?

Garland T. McCoy Jr. is the founder and chief development officer of the Technology Policy Institute. James V. DeLong is vice president and senior analyst of the Convergence Law Institute and a visiting fellow at the Digital Society. The views expressed here are our own, and do not necessarily represent the views of any of the institutions with which we are associated.

FURTHER READING: DeLong also wrote “Tea Time for Vets,” discusses “Googling the Book Settlement,” and recommends “Making Finance Easy to Fix, Not Hard to Break.” Hiwa Alaghebandian gives us a “Homework Assignment.”