"The door outside Senator Ron Wyden's office says, 'The Senator from Oregon,'" said the speaker who introduced him at a packed morning CES discussion. "It should also say, 'The Senator from the Internet!'" Cheers abounded.

With last year's defeat of SOPA/PIPA, Wyden went from being a kind of "digital Don Quixote" to someone whose views on Internet and tech policy have a major public following.

After graciously downplaying the introduction as "inflationary," Wyden moved into the meat of his speech.

When SOPA and its predecessors were being debated, "People thought Rep. [Darrell] Issa and I were going to be nothing but a sizzling meal for the legacy content industry," he said. "But you know the rest of the story: the 15 million calls and e-mails that came in to Capitol Hill. A few days after the Internet went dark, finally, a light bulb went off in Congress, and we were able to waylay that legislation."

Government's main role in technology should be to stop incumbent companies who try to "hotwire" the system, said Wyden. "Not infrequently, they seek out special help from the government—while claiming they want a marketplace that doesn't favor government intervention."

To have a properly functioning free market, said Wyden, there is a role for government "that addresses market failures, blocks cartel, blocks monopoly, and holds back anti-competitive forces. It's a legitimate act of government to block those."

An agenda for “Internet freedom”

Wyden called on "those activists in the cause of Internet freedom, and in the cause of the digital economy," to not let up. "That includes the 15 million people the US Congress heard loud and clear last January."

Wyden laid out the technology agenda he's looking to pursue in 2013:

Access to the Internet—meaning, net neutrality and more. "Internet service providers, wired or wireless, must be barred from practices that discriminate against specific content," he said. The FCC's order on Internet openness is a good start but doesn't go far enough, because it doesn't apply to mobile wireless access. For 96 percent of the population, they have one or two wireline ISPs to pick from. If one of those providers slows Internet connections to favor particular content, "they should face the antitrust laws," said Wyden. "The antitrust laws should be strengthened to ensure major ISPs can't use their market dominance to pick winners and losers."

Wyden has introduced recent legislation on data caps, and he'll pursue that in the next Congress, as well. If ISPs need to manage congestion, that's fine; but data caps "shouldn't be used to create scarcity in order to monetize data," said Wyden. "Entrepreneurs need the freedom to compete, and that begins with an Internet connection."

Software patent reform. "Congress ought to begin a review of software patents' contribution to the economy," said Wyden—or lack of contribution. "How are you promoting innovation if you stand behind a law that allows a few lines of code to be patentable for 20 years? Software is different from many new innovations in America. It is a building block, a set of instructions, that we ought to be able to build on and improve."

Privacy, including ECPA reform and more care with our "cybersecurity" laws. "It is especially troubling that the documents Americans leave lying around on their kitchen counter receive more protections than the content Americans store in the cloud," he said. To that end, we need a need a pro-privacy update of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which governs when law enforcement can get access to e-mail communications. That's an issue which is receiving more attention following last year's Petraeus sex scandal, which was discovered when the FBI snooped through the CIA director's Gmail account.

"Cybersecurity shouldn't be done in such a way that it exposes the private communication of the American people to government and corporate snoops," said Wyden. Unfortunately, cybersecurity legislation, which poses real privacy threats, is one issue where Wyden's views seem to be in the minority. The CISPA cybersecurity bill received strong support from both parties in the House, and Wyden said today that he was one of only a few Democrats in the Senate who opposed it.

Fighting for content that ought to be shared. It's time to push back against "the maximalist approach" to copyrights and patents, said Wyden. "Rightsholders are too eager to scare off challenges to the status quo, and this perpetuates stagnation," said Wyden. His own father was an author who knew the importance of copyright to his living. But maintaining a proper balance between rightsholders and protecting innovation is the key. To that end, Wyden proposed to penalize false representations (like bogus DMCA takedown), strengthen fair use, and provide "real due process when you have seizures of property." (That's a reference to the website seizures done by ICE and DOJ, which haven't worked out that great in the case of music blog Dajaz1 and the Rojadirecta sports-streaming site.)

Progress on warrantless wiretaps

In a meeting with reporters and lobbyists after the session, Wyden discussed the renewal of the FISA courts bill, which allows for warrantless wiretapping. Wyden acknowledged the renewal of that bill was a setback, but he emphasized the progress that has been made.

"We did get 43 votes on a key measure [that would have limited the bill], including very conservative Republicans like Chuck Grassley and Pat Toomey," who were not easy to win over, he said.

In Wyden's view, 2012 saw "the forces of digital freedom" winning two out of three key votes. First, PIPA/SOPA was defeated by a groundswell of public outcry. The second victory was the "so-called anti-leaks bill," in which "provision after provision was chucked overboard." Only the third, the FISA renewal bill, was a loss. Even there, Wyden expressed confidence the vote is part of a long march to victory. "It's not if, it's when."