First, I'd like to thank Richard Bennett for the shout out and recognition on Cybertlecom. You can read Richard's blog here: http://bennett.com/blog/
Second, this video is one of the better discussions of Internet law and policy I've seen in a long time. It was on point, honest, and detailed. Richard, like myself, suggests focusing on the Internet of the Future. This is something that Richard, Dave Farber, Chuck Jackson, and Jon Peha covered in a very rich discussion that occurred recently on Capitol Hill.
Third, having spent the first half of my professional career enabling as a lawyer the technologies these magicians brought into the world, I'd like to pick up on their thoughts and provide a further legal / regulatory perspective:
"Simplicity is a virtue too" - Chuck Jackson.
I think you are correct to point out the need for a more reasonable discussion around Net Neutrality. At bottom we need to begin to agree to what it is the problem we are solving. From your presentation and discussion before the US House of Representatives and in other places, I gather your concern, like mine, is that today's regulatory regime is strangling Internet innovation. It seems as if the law has been made the enemy of every law we love from Metcalf to Reed. From where I sit, it is as if each and every thing that touches any incumbent LEC must reverse engineer itself in terms of technology and economy to pay for network configurations and services that were already well on their way to becoming ancient in the 1980s. It is only very recently that most of the class 5 switches in this country were upgraded to being LNP capable, which, honestly, is insane. Yet we have subsidized it and continue to subsidize this system to the tune of billions of dollars not to mention hundreds of billions of lost market value and innovation that gets crushed beneath the slow moving tractor treads of incumbent telco plus state and federal law that has zero conception of fiber optic, ubiquitous computing power, cloud environments, optical switching, and open source.
Accordingly, to be an enemy of Net Neutrality is to be a friend of the Internet and innovation. Net Neutrality sets us up for a massive fall into moving from the pay per call, per mile, per minute world that didn't work in 1983, has zero relevance today but remains as insidious as it is pervasive into an even more regressive and disabling world where we will pay per bit, if not pay per thought. Arguably, given the incredible conflicts between those who "own" "content" and those who "don't own it", adding to that befuddled and regressive dynamic a world where those who'd have you pay for the infrastructure 10 billion times over on a per bit basis, and what you have is complete disaster.
All that said, what you want, what I want, what the FCC really wants, and ultimately what AT&T, Verizon, Google, Cisco, Apple, HP, and any and every network (regardless of layer) want is a world where we fund and construct the best, most open network possible: wide open fiber optic to the premises while enabling competition that matters to people. Voice is not it. Voice is an application, and that's an overstatement. People value intelligence; they value devices, software, connectivity, and interactivity that help them make sense of their world. They will pay a king's ransom for things like iPhones or apps, not voice, not copper, not minutes and not miles.
Accordingly, a giant problem with Net Neutrality is that we continue to fund a scarcity model in the physical network plant, are faced with a host of problems within the IP and layers above, while we are trying to use law to make an IP network behave like lower layer transport network without paying to upgrade all network plant. Yet, not only to we continue to fund monopoly copper endlessly, we turn the other way when state regulators affirmatively cross subsidize deregulated Bellco plant while incumbent landline carriers cherry pick the networks they haven't driven out of business and dump the ones from which further subsidy harvesting is no longer profitable enough. That we struggle to make any technology work, much less make the entire Internet work in this environment, should come as no surprise. That we cannot agree what non-discrimination should mean is beyond question as the results of getting that requirement wrong, relative to network, technology employed, location, time, and a billion other variables can, will, and have mean the complete financial destruction of advanced networks primarily at the hands of state regulators (while federal regulators hide behind complexity in order to eschew responsibility for such destructive results).
Were we to start at the physical layer, define rational objectives there; divest ourselves of the irrelevant silos of the past (i.e. "mobile wireless" "telephone" "cable" "satellite" etc.), and think in terms of what nations worldwide see as simply pure connectivity, we can and will unleash and enable innovation on a scale that I personally believe would take the downward trending log curve of money invested in copper, minutes, cores, etc. and reinvigorate and revitalize interactive environments of value in ways we cannot even dream of today.
Yet, if we insist upon maintaining the illusion of competition, the illusion of investment, and the illusion of innovation that currently swirls around Net Neutrality, we can only be sure of one thing: our future will be delayed, it's benefits blunted, and innovation stillborn. It is time that we, as a society, allow the past to die so that we may quit fighting ridiculous and unnecessary battles (some of which I'm gearing up to take into the FCC right now - just the most ludicrous of questions), and begin, together, to lay the seeds of innovation today that are so critically needed to ensure our children reap the rewards of our efforts tomorrow. The future begins right now; we don't have a moment to waste.
Erik
0 comments:
Post a Comment