A highlight of Freedom2Connect's final afternoon was an appearance by Reed Hundt.
Hundt was chairman of the FCC from 1993-1997, when the Web was first being spun. Under Hundt the 1997 Telecommunications Act was passed, the e-rate was passed, and All You Can Eat (AYCE) Internet service became the norm, because Hundt's FCC refused to approve Bell attempts to impose per-minute rates on local calls.
Reed Hundt
Reed Hundt is the former chair of the FCC, now working with McKinsey & Co. and on corporate boards like those of Intel and Tropos
(Introduced as the father of All You Can Eat (AYCE) pricing on the Internet, because his FCC resisted access charges and per-minute local calling prices from phone companies. Hundt wore a suit, but quickly noted that his right arm was in a sling, due to an accident.)
I’m a pure left winger now.
People ask me how I broke my bone. I was on a hunting trip with the Vice President, and I ducked. So he just winged me.
(Looking behind at the Wiki conference.) I admire how you elevated classroom muttering to bathroom scrawling.
My amusing remarks come from the Wall Street Journal, a March 2006 article, “How France became the leader in offering fast broadband.”
I sent the author a note, “I praise your article but note that in French “deregulation” equals “enforceable unbundling” She wrote, “You’re right. Deregulation was a bad choice. Opening the phone lines to competition would have been preferable.” In other words deregulation should have been understood to be regulation.
With this little adjustment you can read the Wall Street Journal, and understand government policy in the US Senate and House. You can also understand why a part of the fix we’re in as a country is that we don’t have an intelligible discussion in real honest candid terms on matters of importance. We don’t have a concept of objectivity, even truth, which ought to be the basis of any discussion on net neutrality and openness.
This is, in fact, an old story.
It is the story of distributoin and transportation systems since the beginning of time. It is the battle between distributors and content. Whether we’re speaking of the railroads, the fight for an ICC in the late 19th century, it is the same as the discussion between theater owners and theatrical exhibition leading to the Paramount case.
The purpose of competition is to create a bottleneck and extract rents.
This is part of the nature of competition.
But as JK Galbraith said 50 years, the US has always been a country of private welath and public poverty.
What we’ve seen in the last 20 years is new ways to obtain private wealth without public property. We see it in Iraq, where to an astonishing degree, we have a war financed and operated by private sources. We have an untold number of private contractors involved in combat-like operations there. We have in health care a move to convert virtually everything that might have been and is part of the public system elsewhere into a private system. The President is sayhing “buy more insurance” to assure more private access to health care, not to replicate the VA.
We have in education more and more money paid, it costs more to get a so-called public education at the college level than anywhere else. UC Santa Barbara now costs over $20,000/year, in-state. Charter schools and private schools are all part of it.
We saw TV go to a pay medium, and now we’re seeing frequencies historically designated for non-commercial networks auctioned, and turned into a private paid broadcast medium, one to many.
It should come as no surprise whatsoever that the battle within the telephone industry is one where the proprietors assert a property interest in the network, they wish to create a private Internet, they wish to sell access and bundle on top of it content and conduit.
What’s important is it be recognized as not the only way to organize an economy or society, and we’re not even close to talking about it in a way that reflects the importance of the debate.
We’re debating whether or not it would be the case that if a carrier had an extra dollar would it put it into a better network. That’s the nature of the debate. The assumption of all policies is that the answer is, “of course.”
This is the same approach the Administration has taken to the eocnomy across the board.
At the height of the 1990s boom corporate profits were $800 billion. Theyu’re now $1.4 trillion. It’s the fastest profit increase in the history of capitalism. This has not been an accident. It is the function of a combination of tax policy changes, and industry structure changes. It is a function of taking a hard look at the increases of commodity prices, and deciding the profits will go to producers, not consumers.
Economists tell you it’s arbitrary whether those profits go to producers or consumers. But it makes a great deal of difference to the consumers.
This is a profit-less economy for workers, productivity gains have meant not hiring new workers.
This $1.4 trillion in profits has largely gone uninvested in the U.S.. It is being distributed in dividends, invested in other countries, and American corporations in general have more cash than in a generation.
None of these things are an accident, and they are not morally unsound. They’re only to be judged for their effects. Do they align with your goals?
The question begged by network neutrality is, what are the society’s goals?
There should be productivity gains, but those gains have to be translated into a higher standard of living.. That might not be what you purchase, but the access you have to public property.
The brave new creation of public property, of course is the Web.
It’s the greatest new creation of public property in the last 30 years, maybe ever.
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