WASHINGTON — Halfway through a recent House hearing on MySpace and other online social networks, lawmakers had to switch gears to deal with another technology issue: a vote on Internet gambling.
But Congress isn't exactly a haven for the tech-savvy. The alert to rush to the House floor was delivered in low-tech fashion -- by dated pagers clipped to members' belts and clanging bells that made the halls of Capitol Hill echo like a 1950s high school.
Almost daily when Congress is in session, lawmakers are struggling to comprehend new technology and the government's role in shaping its future. In the biggest spurt of legislative activity since the dot-com boom, advocacy groups and businesses are seeking new laws to shape the fast-evolving digital landscape. The effort will resume in September, when Congress returns from its summer recess.
They say the nation's statutes once again must catch up to another generation of technology -- high-definition TV, satellite radio, video downloads and Internet phone calls -- just as they did a decade ago, when the World Wide Web, e-mail and digital music gained wide popularity.
Lawmakers this year could decide whether millions of Americans get TV piped through their phone lines and high-speed Internet access extended to their neighborhoods, how long Internet service providers retain Web-surfing records and how easy it will be to record programs broadcast over high-definition TV.
The task is all the more difficult because few in Congress understand what those engineers in Silicon Valley actually do.
One of the leading gatekeepers for technology legislation, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), has been lampooned on TV and tech blogs after recently describing the Internet as "a series of tubes." The lack of high-tech understanding is so pervasive on Capitol Hill that Vint Cerf, a Google Inc. executive known as a father of the Internet, is considering creating a comic book to show lawmakers how the global network operates.
The last flurry of high-tech legislation occurred in the mid- to late 1990s. Many industry observers believe Congress made mistakes, the biggest of which were in an overhaul of telecommunications law that was supposed to increase competition but instead led to more mergers.
Some say it's time to fix the errors. Others warn that new laws could cause another round of unanticipated problems as lawmakers attempt the always-tricky task of predicting where technology is headed.
