Re: The FCC Spectrum Auction Decision: The Emperor Has No Clothes

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Krulwich <krulwich () yahoo com>
Date: August 1, 2007 9:13:10 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Cc: lauren () vortex com, dana () a-clue com, btm () templetons com
Subject: Re: [IP] The FCC Spectrum Auction Decision: The Emperor Has  
No Clothes
Reply-To: krulwich () yahoo com

Dave and IP-land,

It's easy to argue the issue theoretically, what's best for consumers  
vs the benefits of a free market, but I think that if we consider the  
current state of the telecom industry, the FCC ruling is huge.

The fact is that the cellular industry is standing on a precipice.   
The future clearly consists of open access, services like VoIP, full  
Internet browsing and access to open sites, wider choice of devices,  
etc.  BUT the industry is today controled by cellular carriers, since  
they subsidize the phones that customers get and they're the only  
company that customers really ever deal with.  And they're paying for  
their infrastructure and want to profit from it as much as possible.   
Handset manufacturers are deathly afraid of offending a carrier,  
since if they offend a carrier, their handsets don't get sold.  (The  
slight exception is Nokia, since they're the biggest.)  This is why  
things like dual-mode phones and mass-market phones with software  
extensibility aren't more common than they are.  But at the same  
time, the handset manufacturers do see the future.  They want to get  
there, and to bring new devices to market, but they need to get there  
without blowing the next year or so of profits and putting themselves  
out of business, i.e., without offending carriers.

Given this climate, anything that makes this future come clearer,  
anything that makes it more and more inevitable and obvious that the  
future is open access, and anything that makes consumers and non- 
technical businesspeople think about this future, has the power to  
tip the scales.  More carriers deciding not to block VoIP, more  
carriers tearing down their walled gardens, and more carriers  
offering extensible devices, are all moves in the right direction,  
and anything that nudges them along, and more importantly makes  
businesspeople aware that they need to be nudged along, will bring on  
this future faster.

--Bruce Krulwich



-------------------------------------------
Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com