Spectrum of Greed

It's tough to buck the system - Ask Cool Hand Luke

“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate,” the Cap’n tells the prison population about the recently recaptured Cool Hand Luke.  Dressed in his southern white suit, he pronounces sentence on the rebellious inmate that threatens the orderly status quo of his prison.  I would say we can repeat that phrase to the FCC today.  According to a recent news article from Arstechnica.com, we have a very confused former FCC Chair that is defending the orderly but hopelessly antiquated status quo of our wireless (and wired) network management framework, while courts reviewing a decision on predatory customer retention practices calls foul.

At the heart of the confusion is the definition of what the FCC is in control of.  They think in boxes labeled, phone, internet, wired, wireless, broadcast, media, etc…  What has evaded their recognition so far is the massive convergence of these separately born technologies.  What we citizens of the world today refer to as the ‘Net’.  We can do anything over the net today - watch media, listen to media, make calls, move data - you name it.  So all of these little boxes that the FCC is trying to manage have become a terrible set of stumbling blocks that they can’t get themselves out of.  They are like a hopelessly out of shape middle aged man caught in the middle of a torturous obstacle course.  They are in immediate danger of cardiac arrest, can’t make progress either forward or back, and unfortunately it is too late to enter the training regimen that would have prepared them for a successful completion to the exercise.

Our current economic stimulus bill is a perfect case in point - There is a huge vacuum of innovative ideas and real vision in Washington. This crisis is an opportunity for us to stop our gradual downward spiral into American Idol mediocrity and become a world leader for ourselves and the world again. Instead of the focused, big picture plans that this kind of stimulus package could provide, we are getting more of the same short sighted wasteful spend plans that our legislature is famous for.

What we need to do here is start with a clean sheet of paper.  Blow up the FCC, and start with the innovation environment protection agency, or iEPA, as Larry Lessig likes to call it.  He has the plan here.  Let’s do something good with our stimulus.  After we blow up the FCC, let’s buy back the 700Mhz and lease it out regionally, creating a high speed open network that all traffic can flow on.  Those that manage the network for the US can’t provide content on it, those that want to provide content can’t own part of the network.