Epeus' epigone

Edifying exquisite equine entrapments

Sunday, 28 April 2002

Bob Frankston has an essay on how the FCC should change policy to replace 'telecoms' with 'connectivity'

The simplest ideas are often the hardest to explain. How do we explain that an entire industry is no longer necessary? It's as if we tried adapt an industry built around horses to supporting auto-mobiles. Fortunately the horse industry didn't have the regulatory support that keeps the telecommunications industry from evolving into a connectivity industry.

The good news is that connectivity is indeed simple and our task is to remove barriers rather than create a new and ever more complex regulatory system. The key problem is that the first mile of connectivity is an artificial chokepoint created by modeling telecommunications after the railroads and granting privileged rights of way to companies providing a specific service. There is an inherent conflict between this service-based model and connectivity which gives the customer the ability to define the services.

The remedy of structurally separating the companies that provide connectivity from those that provide services and content may seem radical but it is not unprecedented. We've seen movie studios being forced to divest themselves of their theaters and the TV networks, in turn, couldn't own the production companies until a competitive industry developed.
[...]
The biggest surprise was yet to come. As capacity grew it became possible to use the Internet for carrying audio and video streams without any special engineering. The early implementations were tricky because they had to work around the capacity limitations but the Moore's law effect delivered abundant capacity. Capacity involved not only bandwidth but also latency � for interactions with remote services the travel time was critical.

Just like specialized word processors could not match the rapid pace of improvement in general purpose computing, special purpose networks were no match for the general purpose networking that the Internet provided.


Another good exposition of the central point - compare with the ones I collected here.
Posted by Kevin Marks at 22:27

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About Me

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Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks works on IndieWeb and open web tech. From 2011 to 2013 he was VP of Open Cloud Standards at Salesforce. From 2009 to 2010 he was VP of Web Services at BT. From 2007 to 2009, he worked at Google on OpenSocial. From 2003 to 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 25 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati, Kevin spent 5 years in the QuickTime Engineering team at Apple, building video capture and live streaming into OS X. He was a founder of The Multimedia Corporation in the UK, where he served as Production Manager and Executive Producer, shipping million-selling products and winning International awards. He has a Masters degree in Physics from Cambridge University and is a BBC-qualified Video Engineer. One of the driving forces behind microformats.org, he regularly speaks at conferences and symposia on emergent net technologies and their cultural impact.
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