John Thune is prairie player in tech world

When Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune (R-S.D.) took the stage at a Washington event in April to accept an award from the Internet Association, the crowd was filled with representatives from America’s biggest, buzziest internet firms.

Representatives from companies like Amazon and Facebook feted the South Dakota senator, providing evidence that Thune, a genial and lanky Republican from a Plains state not known for its links to the tech industry, has made himself into an indispensable player in debates over the future of technology policy and its ripple effects around the economy.

{mosads}“I think staying on the creative cutting edge when it comes to technology is something that will allow the United States to continue to lead the world,” he told The Hill in a phone interview shortly before his reelection win. 

“They’re issues that I don’t know a lot about, I’ll admit, but I’m learning a lot more about all the time,” Thune said. “And there are so many areas where these things that we’re doing in the tech world has translated into other sectors of our economy with some profoundly positive benefits.”

Thune’s education on technology issues began when he unexpectedly became the committee’s ranking member after then-Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) left the Senate to become the head of the conservative Heritage Foundation.

When he became chairman in 2014, Thune said in a speech at the conservative American Enterprise Institute that lawmakers should work to free up government-owned spectrum — the invisible frequencies that carry signals to mobile devices — for private use. 

Thune this year released a bill to carry through that pledge, though it did not make it out of Congress. 

He’s found bipartisan ground on a bill to reauthorize the Federal Communications Commission, which would give Congress another chance to weigh in on the goings-on at the agency. That bill, however, also failed to make it through Congress before lawmakers left this month.

“He knows the facts, he knows the background, he knows where the policy challenges are and he knows what needs to be done,” said Andy Halataei, senior vice president for government affairs at the Information Technology Industry Council.

“And I think the other thing that gives us confidence is the way he conducts the debate is that it’s usually pretty open, transparent, it’s pretty thoughtful and it lends itself to a bipartisan result.”

Even some who disagree with Thune sing his praises.

“We don’t always agree with Chairman Thune on a number of issues so, understanding that, I think he’s been good to work with given our disagreement on a number of issues,” said Chris Lewis, a vice president at public interest group Public Knowledge.

“We’ve found areas where we can agree or where we can compromise and work together, and I think those have been probably the most interesting over the last couple of years, but they don’t always get the biggest amount of attention.”

Thune has sought to work closely with Sen. Bill Nelson (Fla.), the top Democrat on the committee.

This fall, Nelson met Thune in South Dakota to tour a scientific research facility — buried deep beneath the earth in a former goldmine — before doing some sightseeing at Mount Rushmore. Thune is hoping to visit the Everglades with Nelson in the future.

A key part of Thune’s political origin story is his upbringing in Murdo, S.D., a city that in 2014 had a population of just 482 people. His father Harold — a former Navy pilot — still lives there.

“His window of the world now is kind of the internet,” Thune said. His father, at the age of 97, is able to turn to Google for answers and email for communication.

Unless he encounters technical difficulties — then, like many American parents, he turns to his children for tech help.

“When I was out there last week, my dad got some sort of malware on his computer and so I was sitting there one morning trying to figure it out — and playing with it, messing with it,” Thune said. “Believe it or not, with my rudimentary knowledge, we actually got him going again. But it just occurred to me how dependent we’ve become just in our daily lives. Even a guy his age, and in his community, and his stage of life, how important and how valuable that is to him.”

Thune has approached tech issues with an eye toward the rural communities he represents.

“There are just so many ways in which a smaller town in a rural area of the country needs to have the same types of benefits available to them that technology offers,” Thune said.

Remote work opportunities are improved by access to strong internet connections. So is telemedicine, which allows doctors or other healthcare professionals to assess patients from afar.

A Thune bill that passed the Senate last year, for example, made it easier for rural skilled nursing facilities to get access to subsidies for internet connections.

He also says he sees the ways that technology has permeated the many other areas the Commerce Committee has jurisdiction over. That includes transportation, where the committee has examined the rise of self-driving cars.

There have been times, however, where bipartisanship hasn’t been able to get the job done for Thune.

Early in his tenure as chairman, he began the process of finding a legislative fix for the debate over net neutrality, or the idea that all content on the internet should be treated in the same way.

But he says that fight got “so partisan, so early” — especially after the Federal Communications Commission approved rules meant to guarantee net neutrality. That rule quickly was contested by the industry in court, but the agency has so far prevailed.

So while Nelson and Thune’s staff continued to negotiate, they were never able to get a deal.

“At the moment, you know, I’d love to get a deal, and I think Sen. Nelson is by and large in the same place, but I think right now his caucus, and our caucus for that matter, are in positions where they might rather fight this out in litigation,” Thune said.

Thune has expressed lofty goals for the committee’s next term, when he is expected to once again serve as chairman, including rewriting the landmark Communications Act.

He also says he’s interested in exploring the bleeding-edge topics that come with some of Silicon Valley’s newest innovations. That includes autonomous vehicles, augmented reality and drones.

“One of the things that has a lot of potential in our world out here is drones,” he said, before adding carefully, “I’m not going to be personally out there flying drones.”