more on Lessons from the Meltdown of U.S. TelephoneIndustry - Giving Top Priority to the Internet

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Bob Frankston <rmfxixB () bobf Frankston com>
Date: Fri, 08 Nov 2002 21:11:56 -0500
To: dave () farber net, "'ip'" <ip () v2 listbox com>
Subject: RE: <[IP]> Lessons from the Meltdown of U.S. TelephoneIndustry -
Giving Top Priority to the Internet

I appreciate being cited.
 
I started to write a longer response but better to be brief ... though each
time I try I find myself writing too much.
 
It's as if Compaq were claiming it was impossible to be in the commodity PC
business and that Mike Dell couldn't exist.
 
We see a form of this anti-market paternalism in the "broadband policy"
insanity. I can't think of a better word when we are told that we need
broadband to allow for innovation but since no one is coming up with
broadband apps we better preempt innovation and create artificial ones. The
PC industry just gives people opportunities and then races to stay ahead (to
oversimplify).
 
This is why I chose to focus on "no new wires" for home (data) networking. I
could've just told everyone to install fiber in their homes but chose the in
place messy phone (irony?) wire instead. Same situation in the ground --
copper can carry many times the capacity of today's DSL with no distant
limits just by putting simple electronics on the wire and at the demarc.
Fiber can come in due course but doing it as a high capital effort ahead of
demand is Telecom Classic. (though you should put in fiber instead of new
copper and when it is easy).
 
Whether it's Japan, Noam, or even the CATO institute, I'm troubled not so
much by the inability to have faith in marketplaces as the inability to see
how far we've already gone in doing precisely what people don't trust the
marketplace to do. Instead we seem to want the government or incumbents to
give us a tame dead version by 2006.
 
And maybe that's the real problem -- people want to do something for (to?)
us and the Internet is about not doing us favors. What's a
governance/paternalist to do? It's as if I suggested people could have home
network without having to call an installer -- the concept "didn't parse".
 
PS: I'd like to post a version of this to SATN -- do you have a reference
URL? I guess I can point to the IP archive. (though I don't trust any URL to
persist but that's a different issues).
Bob Frankston
http://www.Frankston.com
http://www.satn.org

------ End of Forwarded Message

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