Could Obama ring in changes?

WIRED:THERE ARE two flavours of news running through the tech community this week. One, obviously, is the iPhone, with Jobs's impeccable stage-managing creating exactly the kind of buzz about that brand that he intended.

The other ubiquitous brand this week is Barack Obama and, in techie circles, speculation on his intentions towards the high-tech corners of the United States.

Obama's message to the geeks is rather more hazy than the gospel according to Jobs. But so far it seems that, for Obama's policy team, openness and free markets will be the hallmarks of US tech initiatives.

And while that doesn't necessarily affect the bottom line of Apple, it will affect whether Jobs's iPhone is the model of the future, or just one flavour of an explosion of innovation in the wireless world.

While frequently billed as a disruptive force in the mobile phone world, the iPhone is actually a carefully controlled and closed device. It is locked to one provider (AT&T in the United States) and only approved applications written by third parties can be installed on it.

Apple's closed roadmap means that the first developers hear of new features (like 3G or GPS) is literally a few weeks before they are sold to users.

Well boo hoo, you might say. It's not as if the iPhone hasn't managed to attract a wide range of software and become the lustful target of consumers while remaining as closed as - well, as most other pieces of hardware sold in the world of mobile phones.

The attempts to create a truly open phone system have not yet gone far (although Google's Android probably represents a reasonable future attempt).

After years of open-source advocacy and the belittling of closed platforms, Apple seems to be intent on showing that it can easily transcend the scattergun world of Linux or Windows PCs.

And what has this to do with a potential next US president? Well, as the Washington policy pack prepares for this year's reshuffle (whether it is McCain or Obama), one of the key tech governance decisions is going to be what sort of device should be encouraged on America's mobile networks.

At the heart of that debate is Tim Wu, a technologist turned academic who has now joined one of the more powerful pressure groups in Washington.

Wu has been an influential thinker on the topic of network neutrality - that principle that the internet's ISPs should not meddle with what end-users do on it.

Now he has become the chair of Free Press, a group that champions the reform of American media.

If Obama wins (or perhaps even if McCain's promise of abandoning Bush sureties comes to pass), Wu and academics like him will be the first to be approached about how to best lift the US out of what is perceived as the telecommunications doldrums.

Broadband infrastructure and adoption in America are currently far inferior to its competitors; innovation and investment in the radio spectrum has stalled.

Some will see the iPhone as an example of the market-led innovation. But Wu has highlighted the iPhone as an innovative device that kills other innovative devices.

While the iPhone is novel, it is deliberately designed to prevent other novelties that might undermine or compete with its success or that of Apple's partners. You can't do anything on an iPhone that would make AT&T unhappy, which means that AT&T will always remain the gatekeeper of content in the iPhone world.

And if you try to do something with the iPhone that Apple doesn't want, you're taking a big risk. While you can "jailbreak" the iPhone to run your own application, many think such hacks could be illegal - and certainly Apple has little compunction when it disables or punishes such hacks.

Contrast this with innovation in the PC and internet world. Both spheres are full of new ideas (including many spearheaded by Mac). But none of them have the power to lock out competitors in quite the same way.

Wu and other policy figures in Washington are taking up the challenge of explaining why the cellular networks, and the radio waves in general, should be more open to innovation: that Apple can create an iPhone, but other open device makers shouldn't be locked out of AT&T's network as they can be now.

Microsoft can put out a new version of Office, but it can't stop someone creating a cheaper clone. Google can rule the world of internet search, but it can't (easily) make deals to stop other search engines from challenging its position.

Wu wants that kind of openness for the mobile phone world. Early soundings indicate that Obama's tech policy team aren't averse to Wu's ideas. In other areas, Obama's campaign has encouraged such grassroots innovation and understands the promise of the internet's openness, even when it has risked casting the main campaign in a bad light. For instance, accusations of sexism and anti-Semitism have regularly blown back at the candidate after his followers have "gone off-message" in Obama websites or local campaigns.

But for all Obama's talk of change, America will always remain a place that is sceptical of government regulation. Wu and Free Press may have good ideas on how to spread the openness of the net to the telephony world. But "market freedom" - the freedom for AT&T, and Steve Jobs, to do what they want, as long as what they want sells - still remains the killer brand in DC circles.