A Conversation with Bob Frankston, Inventor of VisiCalc, Internet Legend ...

Bob & I have been discussing the Internet, law, technology, economics and policy on closed email lists for years. Bob's a good friend and someone I greatly respect. He's also someone who has influenced my thinking greatly. Recently, in response to controversies over Net Neutrality, Bob and I got to conversing about how to fix things.

Here's my response to a recent post from Bob's blog: Conversation with Erik Cecil on Net Neutrality

Bob,

I couldn't agree more with you. We've been funding the network of 1945 for years now while Verizon and AT&T build their own network of the future, locked down, walled off and dribbling out innovation on their terms, not ours. It is the greatest irony of regulation for the public that the public has no idea how regulation works, no idea that they are paying to rebuild monopolies that turn around and suck them dry of every possible cent in the name of preserving services even the networks admit are done and gone.

Between the present walled gardens where law and regulation is used to disable human achievement and innovation and a world where glass is simply what it is - a utility input - lies the question of how best to enable individual human beings. Because the Internet turns the telephone network inside and out, so too must we turn regulation inside out and give to individuals all of the rights of common carriers because, in all honesty, "common carriage" as a business, as a middle, is irrelevant to the value of networks. Rather, what is needed are massive, neutral network operators wise enough to spend their time, effort and money empowering individuals rather than inventing new ways to restrict innovation that they may dribble it out a bit at a time to a public and a technological world capable of innovation on scales that these entities are actually terrified to consider.

Voice and channel vendors are, as a business and value proposition, dead. One knows this from reading their 10Ks, 10Qs and comments on file with the FCC. But going to bit vendor, which is precisely where Net Neutrality is going to put us, is not the answer either. As an interim step, however, we can at least declare all IP to be common carriage (we already do in many realms - CMRS providers, for example, can provide "non-telecommunications", including IP, but it is treated as "common carriage" and thus "telecommunications" nonetheless. (Were this not the case, then no CMRS network - AT&T, Verizon, TMO, Sprint, etc. could interconnect with another at cost-based rates per Sections 251/2 of the Telecom Act as they are deploying 4G / LTE / WiMax, and other technologies that are entirely not telecommunications in ancient legal views under which we must still live).

Unless and until we free the FCC from the moorings of serving "industry" so that it may serve individuals; unless and until we free ourselves from ancient conceptualizations of how to fund and deploy computer networks that also happen to provide voice functionality, we're going to continue to pour billions of dollars down the greedy gullets of giant networks whose main objective is value extraction. In 2008-2009 the largest incumbent telephone carriers saw ROIs of 100%, which, in this day and age is nothing short of the obscenity we've seen with the worst of Wall Street excesses. Yet it continues unabated.

Let's hope the world wakes up.

***for more on Bob's thinking, check Debi Jone's blog, Mobile Jones: "It's Infrastructure, Stupid"