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The President-elect's first YouTube radio address. The topic is the economy.

The video and a transcript are both at that link at change.gov.

The Web has long been an intellectual infrastructure, and some of its well-placed advocates seem now to be moving into positions where they can at least affect and perhaps effect tech policy.

Sarah Lai Stirlan at Wired reports, Net Neutrality Advocates In Charge Of Obama Team Review of FCC.

The Obama-Biden transition team on Friday named two long-time net neutrality advocates to head up its Federal Communications Commission Review team. Werbach_kevin Crawford_4

Susan Crawford, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, and Kevin Werbach, a former FCC staffer, organizer of the annual tech conference Supernova, and a Wharton professor, will lead the Obama-Biden transition team's review of the FCC.

Both are highly-regarded outside-the-Beltway experts in telecom policy, and they've both been pretty harsh critics of the Bush administration's telecom policies in the past year.

(Net neutrality is the principle that data packets on the Internet should be moved impartially, without regard to content, destination or source. Net neutrality is sometimes referred to as the "First Amendment of the Internet." -- whatis.com)

Crawford, Stirlan writes,

... believes internet access is a "utility."

"This is like water, electricity, sewage systems: Something that each and all Americans need to succeed in the modern era. We're doing very badly, and we're in a dismal state," she said at the time.

Net access is not quite as essential as electricity, running water and a toilet. What universal access would actually resemble is more like over-the-air TV, which goes away in February.

I'm a longtime advocate of universal access to the Internet -- more than a decade ago I was on the board of the nonprofit Ocean State Free-Net, which offered free, text-based dialup access to the Internet. But what will finally drive this is less this lofty ideal than that it is also in the interest of government and commercial interests to have universal access to us.

That will entail designing simpler, more intuitive hardware and software interfaces, and a universal education initiative will be needed to get everybody here. Thinking about what these would look like is intriguing; I think it's fun.

The Wired story includes a list of transition team members from the tech sector, from change.gov.

Perhaps worth noting:

Justice and Civil Rights

* Tom Perelli is Managing Partner of the D.C. office of Jenner & Block and a member of the Firm's Management Committee. Prior to returning to Jenner in 2001, he served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Division from 1999-2001 with responsibility over the Federal Programs Branch and partial responsibility for the Tobacco Litigation Team; from 1997-99, he served as Counsel to the Attorney General.

Jenner & Block are the Recording Industry Association of America's lawyers, and Perelli is listed on the law firm's web site as co-chair of the firm's entertainment and new media practice.

(Wired: It's possible, then, that Perelli may have a hand in influencing who the nation's first "copyright czar" will be.)

Perelli is a Brown grad.

More team leaders.

Susan Crawford's site; Kevin Werbach's site and blog.

via Tech President