Tweet the People: Twitter VC Wilson and Federal CTO Chopra Talk Policy in D.C.

March 17, 2010 at 5:15 am PT

Ms. BoomTown went to Washington, D.C., this week to moderate a panel on the future of the digital arena for an event marking the 25th anniversary of the first .com domain.

Surprisingly, the panelists–Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson, Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra, Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington and VeriSign (VRSN) CTO Ken Silva–did not talk about geo-location jet packs and augmented reality for everyone.

Instead, due to their proximity to pols and government bureaucrats, they went wonkish, talking a lot about open government, data-retention regulations and, in Wilson’s case, pondering the “privacy heist” of consumer information by Silicon Valley social networking hotshot Facebook.

Now, to be fair, Wilson is a big and early investor in rival Twitter, so he might have his bias.

But the conversation was a refreshing change from pointless discussions on location wars between Foursquare and Gowalla and reporting-free speculation about whether MySpace is or is not for sale or will spin off or not.

In fact, it was almost erudite, except for the part about how the Federal Communications Commission gave me a giant paper-filled binder of the National Broadband Plan (more on that classic D.C. tree-killing move later!).

So that you too can get all federal, here’s a video I did with Wilson and Chopra, in which they talk tech policy:

Tagged with: Aneesh Chopra, anniversary, Arianna Huffington, augmented reality, bureaucrat, com, consumer, D.C., data, digital, event, Facebook, federal, Federal Communications Commission, Foursquare, Fred Wilson, geo-location, government, Gowalla, heist, Huffington Post, information, Internet, interview, jet pack, Kara Swisher, Ken Silva, location, Myspace, National Broadband Plan, Open, panel, paper, policy, politics, privacy, regulation, retention, sale, Silicon Valley, social networking, spinoff, Tech Policy Feature, tweet, Twitter, Union Square Ventures, Verisign, video, Washington, wonkish

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Hi Kara- I saw your mention of the first dot.com there ever was. I never really thought about what the first one was. Pretty good information to have. Don't you wish you knew back then how valuable certain domains were going to be? I would have bought thousands of them!