Policy beyond the potholes

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Bob Frankston" <Bob19-0501 () bobf frankston com>
Date: June 1, 2009 5:21:27 PM EDT
To: <dave () farber net>
Cc: "'Dewayne Hendricks'" <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Subject: Policy beyond the potholes

I cringe whenever I hear the arguments that we can’t have community  
owned infrastructure for connectivity because local governments can’t  
fix potholes. I wouldn’t mind it so much if that argument wasn’t used  
to shut off further discussion.

We should be asking why we are denied the “dumb-pipes” that provide  
vital infrastructure and why we allow phone (and TV) companies to  
horde vital infrastructure. Instead we accept the “pothole” argument  
as a reason we can’t be trusted to communicate on our own.

This story in the NYT (New York Times) this week
Long a Driver's Curse, Chicago Parking Gets Worse
By SUSAN SAULNY
So many privately run parking meters were out of order in Chicago that  
the city declared a moratorium on writing tickets.

should help put that nonsense to rest along with other simplistic  
notions that “private enterprise” is always better than “government”.  
These are terms and sound bites that have no deep meaning but spare us  
the need to think.

How is this any different from expecting phone or cable companies to  
be able to run an infrastructure that threatens their existence? It’s  
far more extreme than the failed idea of having CLECs (Competitive  
Local Exchange Carrier) being dependent upon the threatened incumbents  
for transport.

I compare these efforts to accepting a just-so surface story. You  
don’t have to dig very deeply to see the structural problems.

Often it seems the issues are couched in terms of good guys and bad  
guys or, more to the point morality as noted in another NYT piece from  
this weekend

A Promise to Be Ethical in an Era of Immorality
By LESLIE WAYNE
A new oath to be taken by graduates of Harvard Business School next  
week says, in effect, that greed is not good.

Granted there have been well-known extreme cases of sociopathic  
behavior as in the case of Enron. But it is ill-advised to substitute  
simplistic notions of ethics for understanding structural issues. If  
we align self-interests then greed, or the desire to benefit oneself,  
can work in our favor. It’s about how the interests are aligned –  
altruists don’t necessarily have a stake in improving society.

Focusing on technology has provided me with a laboratory for  
understanding the structural issues. The question is how to get people  
to look beyond these simplistic mantras and sound bites. Sound bites  
are a fine way to open a conversation, just like an elevator pitch in  
business.

The real tragedy comes when we lock these sound bites into simplistic  
rules within a regulatory matrix and legal framework.

At D7 (The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital conference) I  
listened to Randall Stephenson of ATT explain why it was so hard to  
supply bandwidth as he described the myriad ways in which they slice  
and dice the capacity though he failed to mention that the reason why  
cellular backhaul is so difficult is that they are buying from  
themselves. I tried to ask why all this complexity when bits are bits  
and whether this was about preventing a price collapse due to  
abundance – but it didn’t fit into the surface story.

I saw this again as the speakers describe the broadcast industry  
without any hint whatsoever that they are wasting a valuable  
infrastructure by locking it into the accidental properties of legacy  
TV and telephony markets. Where is the discussion about what would be  
possible if we liberated it?  Before IBM had to separate hardware from  
software computers were only useful for designated applications –  
society discovered new value in the hardware once it was liberated  
from IBM’s value chain.

We need to stop saying thing like “the governments can’t fix potholes  
so…” and stop pretending that “private enterprise” is magic.  
Governments are us and they have certain structural characteristic;  
corporations are another kind of structure. Those making policy and  
practicing legal legerdemain have a responsibility understand what  
goes on beneath the surface.

http://frankston.com/public





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