Spectrum of Greed

End to traffic Jams on the Internet?

Beginning with his campaign for office, Barack Obama has demonstrated that he understands the potential of the internet to be a game changer.  His campaign team’s ability to harness the social aspects of the web were a major factor in his rise to the oval office.  Now, several new sites are being used by his transition team to answer public questions, vet ideas, and gather information to use in the formation of new policy (Yourseatatthetable and openforquestions:response are two of these new information conduits) .  This is causing giddy outbursts of euphoria to occur on blog sites all over the web. 

InFluence, Chicago Tribune and many more, with the Obama Technology Policy getting us geeks more optimistic than we have been in a decade.

One of the five major tenants of his new tech policy is an enabler for the other four - to  “Encourage deployment of a modern communications infrastructure”.  This is a confusing sentence to me, because it uses the word ‘deploy’, indicating that he recognizes that we don’t currently have a modern communications infrastructure and need to deploy one, but it begins with a lame action word - ‘encourage’.  That mealy mouth approach is not going to get the brave new economy too far down the transitional path with our existing FCC and incumbent providers.

In fact, in some of the discussions already taking place regarding actions the new administration can take to ‘encourage’ a more robust internet, the posturing and positioning between incumbent gatekeepers and the activist watchdogs that have been hounding the FCC for change has already begun.  Below is the opening salvo after several incumbents indicated that federal funds could help them to extend their networks to underserved areas (from a 1/13/09 Washington Post article)

“You just can’t shovel money at the incumbents because these companies will take advantage of the situation and turn this into a boondoggle,” said Art Brodsky, a spokesman for Public Knowledge. “They aren’t even willing at this point to extend the most minimal broadband service to people so how can we believe them now?”

All participants in the discussion of how to get broadband to under served areas are cable companies, telecoms and other land line carriers of one form or another.  Conspicuously absent is a wireless solution.  With the 700Mhz bandwidth sold off to a private lessee less than ten months ago, the outgoing  administration, with the FCC’s ‘revenue first’ strategy, has managed to take the most powerful tool to provide inexpensive broadband connectivity off of the table.  (See Triad 700 comments on wireless potential)

But can things really change?  Maybe.  Julius Genachowski is the heir apparent for the FCC Chairman’s seat.  He is currently President elect Obama’s technology advisor, and a private industry veteran with experience in web 2.0 and a venture capitalist.  With his successful appointment, several industry analysts do see the potential for real change:

“The regulatory initiative is likely to shift some from incumbents . . . to new entrants and other nontraditional telecom and media players, including Internet application/content providers,” Rebecca Arbogast, an analyst at the investment firm Stifel Nicolaus, wrote in a report.(Washington Post article)

Stay tuned.