Begin forwarded message:
From: Erik Cecil <erik.cecil@gmail.com>
Date: October 17, 2009 9:55:56 AM EDT
To: dave@farber.net, Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>, dsearls <dsearls@cyber.law.harvard.edu>, Bob Frankston <Bob19-0501@bobf.frankston.com>
Cc: ip <ip@v2.listbox.com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Re: Internet Pioneers Speak Out on Net Neutrality
While we may reach this point for different reasons, I agree with Brett. Overall regulation has been horrible for Internet Pioneers for two basic reasons: (a) regulation is more political than it is legal; (b) what law we have today is incapable of addressing the transformative economics resulting from disruptive technologies like fiber optic and IP transmission. Time and again, technology is shoe-horned into deployment, operational, and cost patterns defined by incumbents.
As applied Net Neutrality pretends to address harms it admits are directly the result of duopoly, if not monopoly conditions in access markets, by creating "common carriage-like" rights from the statutory cloth of a 40-year old exception to common carriage regulation. As a result of the FCC's attempts to solve all sorts of political, market, and technological problems associated with the evolution, growth and now pervasiveness of the Internet, they are on nearly every legal side of the question of how IP should or should not be regulated.
And while, at a policy level, attempting to re-create some of the rights lost when the FCC abandoned Computer I, II, and III, is laudable, there are such strong monopoly conditions at the loop / access level that resumption of those rights will have very little pragmatic effect. It is not unimaginable that whatever comes of their laudable attempts to resolve difficult issues in a still fragile economy will not survive appeal.
There are ways the FCC could approach this, securing legal rights on solid statutory footing, simplifying a dizzying array of legal interpretations and counter-interpretations that today hobble any competitive entrant, including Brett's WISP, and provide meaningful protections to individual innovators, who, daily continue to make the Internet a frontier for innovation and, therefore, are also Internet Pioneers. Perhaps Net Neutrality will resolve some of these difficult issues, but, because I've ridden shotgun along with waves and waves of Internet Pioneers large, medium and small, and because I've been involved in a skirmish or two along the way winning some but mostly watching the ranks of Internet Pioneers dwindle, like Brett, I am skeptical of meaningful change without fundamental reform.
Still standing up for Internet Pioneers,
Erik J. Cecil, Esq.
On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 3:59 AM, David Farber <dave@farber.net> wrote:
Begin forwarded message:
From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.net>
Date: October 17, 2009 12:22:32 AM EDT
To: dave@farber.net, "ip" <ip@v2.listbox.com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Internet Pioneers Speak Out on Net Neutrality
...and I strongly disagree. Regulation would be damaging and stifle innovation.
--Brett Glass, "Internet Pioneer" (The world's first WISP)
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