The Wealth of Nations in the 21st Century

We can sum up what we want on Internet issues in one word:

                                                                            Connectivity

Connectivity will never be perfect. Connectivity will also be somewhat subjective. But when we use the Internet this is what we want.

There are natural limits to connectivity:

• Language is a limit. Much of China's Internet is now unreachable because the URLs are in Chinese. This will increase, and we will become dependent on translators to push the best of both worlds through language walls that block connectivity.
• Security is a limit. All governments consider some forms of connections out of bounds. All governments seek to control those actions, even within connected networks. And all efforts to do this limit connectivity.
• Speed is a limit. The slowest speed between you and the data (or person) you wish to reach is the speed of your connectivity. This will usually be sub-optimal somewhere along the way, but we can work to fix that. Latency translates as temporary loss of speed.

Connectivity is not what the Bells and cable operators provide. It is not what they wish to provide. What they wish to provide, what they claim they do provide, is:

                                                                            Services

Services combine the connection and what is transacted between the ends. A phone call is a service. A TV show on cable is a service. A software program (or other downloadable file with a fixed cost) is a service. A service provides a business model to one side of the transaction, and rains unearned money on the company providing the connectivity.

When Harold Feld of Wetmachine talks of Whitacre Tiering, he's talking about the Bells conflating connectivity with services. By defining the former as the latter, then holding up delivery until one side pays extra, AT&T seeks to create a bogus "service" it can charge extra for.

This is, of course, nonsense.

Ah, but what of the cost? Click and find out.

In the 21st century, connectivity is our basic infrastructure. The more you have -- the more speed, the more access across all sorts of boundaries -- the greater your access to the world. And the greater your access to the world -- the more connectivity you have -- the more wealth you can create and accumulate.

Let me  summarize this in a way you might understand:

• Guns defined the 17th century, colonization.
   
• Ships defined the 18th century, trade.
     
• Canals and railroads defined the 19th century, industrialization.
     
• Roads defined the 20th century, mass production.
     
• Connectivity will define the 21st century, information.
     

On this we will base the Wealth of Nations going forward.

Now, how rich do you wish this country to be? And what are you willing to do, politically, in order to assure that?