by Kevin Werbach
June 27, 2007 at 9:51 am
· Filed under Session Content, Supernova Announcements, Supernova07
One of the liveliest sessions at this year’s Supernova conference was Assistant US Secretary of Commerce John Kneuer’s talk. Kneuer suggested that market forces would ensure effective broadband competition, and encouraged the technology industry to participate in the upcoming 700 MHz spectrum auction. Several audience members challenged him during the Q&A. An impassioned, yet substantive, discussion on broadband policy and network neutrality followed.
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The kind of “massively disincentivized” market conditions that Kneuer disparages — i.e., the ones that followed the FCC’s faciities-oriented regulatory innovations in 1984 and 1996 — are exactly the ones that gave the United States the world’s first (and for a long time, only) flat-flat rate Internet access market for consumers. Flat rate made it possible for consumers as well as producers/entrepreneurs to “experiment” — for the former it was called “web surfing”, and it gave rise to whole new commercial sectors (e.g., Internet advertising) and ultimately solidified the US’s position as the hub of the global information economy. Most other countries achieved the kind of conditions that the US pioneered only recently (if at all); in the interim, and for the rest “Internet development” largely depended on outsourcing operations to the US or similar markets.
The presence of a guy like Kneuer at the top of the NTIA stands as a ironic commentary on Kneuer’s own remarks. He claims that “innovative lawyers” were the real winners in the lost days of regulated access facilities sharing. Clearly the innovative lawyers have given way to ideologically doctrinaire lawyers with no apparent knowledge of how the real network economy works. How much further must the US fall behind other network economies, what share of foreign direct investment in the US has to be called home, how much of the US domestic Internet production itself has to follow manufacturing offshore before reality intrudes on Kneuer’s fantastical market Shangri La? Hopefully the intrusion of a new administration will make it unnecessary to answer this question the long/hard way…
[...] Doc Searls asked an interesting question to John Kneuer at SuperNova: What were the rate terms and conditions for WiFi, and what would have happened if those channels were auctioned? [...]
trinsic wrote @ July 2nd, 2007 at 5:24 pm
I guess their are some issues I don’t understand. Since auctioning the 700 spec is suppose to be good, why are we assuming that the company with the most money that is able to buy into the spectrum has the most interest in doing good?
I don’t think most people understand that money is a byproduct of the good you are doing in the particular community that you are in. That centers around the values you have about what you what to do with the means that have been given to you, dictated by your own concince. If the primary goal is to provide a service or product to someone with an intent of creating value for only yourself, your company, and your stockholders; are you allowing the feedback loop to continue to flow out though your customers and back by relating to them on a level that matters more to your customers, then it does to your “in the know” capital partners.
Id have to say that right now, big carries like ATT and COMCAST have a vested interest in limiting how customers use access to the internet service and that has a direct negative effect on this feedback loop. As an example, ATT spying on the citizens of the united states because the government told them to do so. The people of the united states are saying we don’t want this type of monitoring, but the message isn’t getting across because the group mindset at ATT thinks that its more important to listen to what the government is saying instead of paying attention to what their customers are saying. And comcast not allowing open access to the networks (which provides a level playing field in that market). COMCAST is now allowed to dictate terms to their customers and they don’t really have much of a choice. This plays out in the form of COMCAST not having to provide a decent level of customer service (because they don’t have to) too restricting services from being used on their network such as VPN traffic.) im probably using some bad examples, but the point im trying to make is, as companies get bigger and merge, interests of all of the merged companies come into conflict with each other. Media companies having stake in internet access is clearly insane because media companies have a vested interest in limit consumer choice though the deployment of consumer restrictive measures such as DRM technology. If this plays out in the world of the Internet, we have a really big problem. The Internet is based on free access to information. If carriers or access providers have a vested interest that runs counter to the will of the people, and the competition is limited by players that have enough money to buy into the spectrum those interests are going to dominate regardless of how much everyone things the free market will balance things out. Am I wrong about this?
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