Law w/o Doc Searls is like air w/o O2.

Thinking outside the Internet box: http://bit.ly/Bbjff

nuff said.

SUNSHINE FOR INFRASTRUCTURE

THE BOTTOM LINE

Fiber optic is to networks what asphalt is to roads. Sure, you pay for it, but you don't brand it; you don't fight marketing wars over it, you don't spend lifetimes litigating over who drove over whose asphalt or what the "nature or type" of asphalt it is you are driving upon, you just produce, deploy, pay sunk costs once (and only once), see to its maintenance (minor incremental costs, not profit center) and allow it's abundance to flow out to the public.

WE ARE VERY LOST: REGULATION TRAPS VALUE

As I have written many times, including on Gordon Cook's list, some of which he publishes in "Cook's Collaborative Edge": quoting Abraham Lincoln: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present…As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.” It is state and federal regulation of telecommunications, wireless, cable television, satellite, etc. that at its core is utterly inadequate to the present and continues to condemn us to the sorts of insanity that some of the Internet's greatest thinkers (and pioneers) like Bob Frankston (in his essay "SIDEWALKS, PAYING BY THE STROLL") and Doc Searls point out ("Dawn of the Living Infrastructure") "strap us down while they bleed us for small change—tiny amounts of ARPU."

As I have pointed out in earlier essays (See "Interstructure") and in many discussions with Doc, Bob and many others throughout the industry, they precisely speak to the effects of a regulatory system gone wrong. While most policy wonks and lawyers debate the ins and outs of U.S. regulatory requirements and the good, bad and ugly of the 1934 Communications Act (as amended), there has been a core group of us that for many years have argued that the underlying assumption sets are the chief evil.

WE CREATE THE COST

There is "cost" in telecom precisely because we create an expensive system, full of conflict, battle, regulation, politics, back room deals, front room deals, and political gerrymandering in the form of various deals and stand-offs b/t state and federal regulators over who takes what cut of what. Regulation makes impossible that which is already possible all across the world: significant empowerment of individuals through provision of a living infrastructure - an Interstructure - that is provided because it creates abundance.

CONNECTIVITY IS SIMPLE, LOW COST, AND OF INFINITE VALUE

Connectivity is not, as our current system assumes, a scarce resource commandeered by private interests on the supposed behalf of the public and rationed out to us as private interests and the regulators whose political lives depend upon those private interests see fit. It is a simple, relatively boring thing - not unlike a road - that enables vast value; it is precisely a value too vast to be entrusted to private enterprise.

Sustaining a system of road vendors whose economic existence depends upon extracting value from roads rather than simply building the lowest cost and best roads possible, and then getting out of the way, is nuts. It is unsustainable.

The sooner we end it, the sooner we can begin to build simple, low cost, infinite value ubiquitous fiber optic infrastructure, placed in the hands of the public for the benefit of the public.