Thomas A. Giovanetti

Thomas A. Giovanetti (better known as Tom Giovanetti) is the President of the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI) think tank.

Ties to American Legislative Exchange Council
IPI is a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as of 2011 and a representative, Bartlett Cleland, is the Co-Chair of ALEC's Telecommunications and Information Technology Task Force.

Background
Tom Giovanetti joined IPI in 1993 and later became its president. IPI is a think tank based in Lewisville, Texas and founded in 1987 by Congressman Dick Armey to "research, develop and promote innovative and non-partisan solutions to today's public policy problems."

The conservative Capital Research Center ranked IPI as amongst the most conservative groups in the US, scoring it as an eight on a scale of one to eight.

In 2009, IPI received almost $1 million in donations and foundation grants.

Writings
Before joining IPI, Giovanetti was the Director of Marketing for a small manufacturing company in Dallas and a freelance writer in Dallas.

As a freelance writer, in 1992 he wrote "Thoughts on Creativity While Watching The Twilight Zone" (published in The Freeman, a publication of the Foundation for Economic Education): "The evil in a command economy is that it attacks the image of God in man, in part by denying man an outlet for his creativity. A command economy is the logical outgrowth of a philosophy that denies the divine and attacks the image of God within man. It was entirely consistent for Communism, which forbade (note past tense!) free religious and artistic expression, also to mandate a strictly planned economy."

In June 2004, the Australian blogger Tim Lambert mentioned IPI as one of several think tanks writing reports critical to open source software while they seem to be funded by Microsoft.

Giovanetti's reply was: "'First, you accuse IPI of taking money from Microsoft, but you have no facts or proof. True, you'd LIKE us to do your homework for you, but in absence of proof, a decent journalist never makes an accusation. . . . Second, regarding whether we take money from Microsoft, IPI has an absolute policy of protecting our donors' privacy.'"

His other writings include:


 * Thomas Giovanetti, "It’s Not About Abramoff," Feb 6, 2006 - defends role of IPI's Ferrara who admitted he took money from Abramoff
 * Thomas Giovanetti, "IPI Urges President To Not Delay Broadband Rollout," April 2, 2004
 * Tom Giovanetti, "A tech tool for future tyrants?", CNET, December 4, 2002
 * Thomas A. Giovanetti, "Taxing Cyberspace Bit by Bit: The Danger of New Internet Taxes", October 10, 1999

External resources

 * Institute for Policy Innovation, "Tom Giovanetti, President," organization website

External articles

 * Phil Shenon, "On Opinion Page, a Lobby's Hand Is Often Unseen," New York Times, December 23, 2005
 * Karsten Gerloff, IPI to the rescue of Microsoft... NOT!, Karsten on Free Software, Free Software Foundation Europe blog, 15 December 2005