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September 25, 2006
FCC to take on Net Neutrality
The FCC is apparently planning to adopt a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) seeking comment on network neutrality.
An NOI is an informational proceeding, in which the agency asks questions but doesn't propose any rules. I'm concerned that this is an attempt to dissipate some of the pressure for nondiscrimination rules, which is now focused on Congress. I actually think the FCC would be the better place to address Net Neutrality issues, but I'm skeptical this proceeding will go anywhere with the current FCC leadership.
Still, those who care about the issue should express their views to the FCC. The agency has an open, Web-based system for comments, which go into the record for the proceeding.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 4:27 PM | Comments (0)
September 22, 2006
Happy One Web Day!
OneWebDay is a global celebration of the Web and its importance to our lives. The first one is being held today in dozens of locations around the world.
My friend Susan Crawford is one of the organizers, and deserves a great deal of credit for kicking off an important, decentralized effort. It's worth being reminded from time to time that The Web is People.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:57 AM
September 19, 2006
How to lie with polls (Net Neutrality edition)
A bogus poll funded by Verizon purports to show that most Americans oppose network neutrality. Just reading the press release, though, shows how slanted the questions were:
"According to the survey, when presented with a choice between video choice and additional net neutrality legislation, an overwhelming majority of voters supported video choice."
Let's see. Do you want more choice or more legislation? That's a toughie!
Does anyone put any stock in ridiculous "bipartisan" surveys like this?
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 7:52 PM
September 18, 2006
Brutal
I'm recovering from watching the Philadelphia Eagles collapse yesterday against the New York Giants.
Walking out of a stadium with 65,000 other dejected fans was a painful experience, although of course the latter stages of the game were even more painful. One of the things I love about being a sports fan is the communal exhileration you get when the times are good. I guess that means you have to take the bad as well. But this one was a bitter pill to swallow.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 2:11 PM | Comments (0)
September 15, 2006
The Economist on Social Networks
The Economist has a few quotes from me in a story this week on social networking sites.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:00 PM
September 13, 2006
Openness vs. Economic Interest
Nick Carr: "Openness is not only the technological structure of the net but also its reigning ideology. But it would be a naive mistake to assume that economic interest will inevitably lose out to technological structure in determining the future shape of the commercial internet."
Well said. And relevant to more than the issue it was written in response to -- whether MySpace will try to suck value out of services like YouTube and PhotoBucket that leverage its user base.
But "economic interest" also isn't as simple as the traditional approach would suggest. As Umair Haque explains, in today's world, exclusivity isn't an effective route to sustainable value creation either.
Enlightened self-interest (typified, so far, by Google) will carry the day. Although as behavioral economics demonstrates, we can't ignore the fact that real people and real companies often don't act that way.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 1:18 PM | Comments (0)
No bill is better than a bad bill
Senator Stevens says that gridlock over network neutrality may derail passage of comprehensive telecom reform legislation this year. It's remarkable that the net neutrality issue has gotten such traction in such a short period of time, especially given how little public and industry interest there was for a long time.
Though it's not widely appreciated, the battle over what is now called network neutrality started in 1998, and the outcome was decided by 2003. The fight now is whether it's possible to retroactively reverse that outcome. I fear it's too late, now that networks and capital have been deployed. (Although I have some ideas which I'm in the process of articulating that might provide some hope.)
In any event, whatever one thinks of network neutrality, derailing this year's telecom bill is a good thing. Whatever passes would almost certainly do significantly more harm than good. The phone companies are probably right that local franchise restrictions on video competition should be eliminated, but they'll get there anyway. The legislation would just speed up their deployment process. Other than that, I have a hard time seeing anything in the proposed legislation that doesn't simply worsen an already bad situation. And passing legislation now would greatly lessen the pressure for better legislation in the near future.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:55 AM | Comments (0)
Who is smarter? We are!
Last night, my Wharton colleauge Jerry Wind told me about We Are Smarter Than Me, a fascinating project that he is involved with, along with former Supernova speaker Tom Malone of the MIT Sloan School of Management. The project is going to write a book about leveraging the power of communities in business by... leveraging the power of community!
The entire book will be communally created and edited as a wiki. Anyone can contribute. A hard copy version will ultimately be published by Wharton School Publishing, and all contributors will be listed as authors, and will receive an equal share of book royalties (donated to a charity of their choice).
Obviously, an undertaking like this isn't trivial. But Jerry and Tom are brilliant thinkers, and they have people like Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales involved. You can pre-register on the site now; the book-writing process starts next month.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:26 AM | Comments (0)
September 11, 2006
Five Years
I still remember what I thought that moment, as I stood on the roofdeck, watching the towers crumble, wondering whether my wife was still alive:
The world will never be the same again.
Everyone around me was crying, as far as the eye could see. We had witnessed the explosions and flames as the planes plowed into the buildings. For an hour, we had heard the sirens screaming downtown to the scene. Then, suddenly, that terrible rumbling. A massive, sickening cloud of dust.
For a long time, before the billowing smoke cleared, we were sure the towers were still there, hidden from view. And then, nothingness. We thought all of those people, all the workers in the World Trade Center and all the emergency personnel who responded, tens of thousands of human beings, had died in the collapse.
Beyond the horror of the lives lost was the profound sense of shock. My office, on the top floor of the building, facing south from 15th Street, looked directly toward the towers. They were landmarks, as much a part of the landscape as the Statue of Liberty or the Hudson River. And then they were gone. For days afterward, I gazed out the window at a smoke cloud.
More than that. We had spent the preceding years celebrating the end of the Cold War and, in the heady optimism of the dotcom boom, the end of the business cycle. My generation of Americans, since reaching adulthood, had experienced only growth and optimism for the future. We had a sense of enormous confidence and possibility for the new millennium. Suddenly, it was all shattered. Shattered. Shattered.
In those first harrowing weeks, no one knew what to expect. Would there be another attack? On the subways, this time, perhaps? Then came the anthrax scare. It was hard to imagine true normalcy returning.
There were many reasons to be thankful, even in those dark days. My wife, whose office was less than a block from Ground Zero, made it out unharmed. So did, miraculously, our close friends who worked in the towers, not yet in their offices when the disaster struck. The estimated death toll, terrible as it was, kept falling, eventually dropping, astoundingly, below 3,000.
And, most hopeful of all, a visit to the doctor that week confirmed that my wife was pregnant with our first child. Hope. A new life. It all sounds so maudlin now. Back then, though, we grasped at any positives we could find. Everyone did.
So, where are we now?
We no longer live in the universe of September 10, 2001. The deeply optimistic world of the roaring 1990s is truly gone, even despite Google and the money rush of Web 2.0. We're at war in Iraq. Air travel is a nightmarish experience. Al Qaeda and its allies continue to strike. NASDAQ 5000 is still a distant memory.
And yet, and yet. It all seems so normal today. So deeply, mundanely, normal. Remembering that terrible day five years ago still gives me chills, but if I try not to think about it, I can almost imagine it never happened. The world seems, tantalizingly, the same.
Perhaps there is a banality of good, to complement Arendt's banality of evil. Life goes on, because, well, that's what life does.
Baruch Spinoza, the 17th century philosopher, described a propery of all living beings that he called the conatus. Conatus is a constant striving to continue to exist, and to flourish in the world. It is a part of who we are, simply by virtue of being something and not nothing. Perhaps that explains this strange, creeping normalcy I feel. Things have not necessarily changed for the better; they have simply continued to happen.
We all have the power to decide what sense we make of the infinite, inexplicable, unknowable universe -- what Spinoza called deus sive natura (God or Nature). Memory, and history, are powerful things. They connect us to that which is beyond our own tiny, individual conatus.
Five years. An instant, and an eternity. Has it truly been so long? I remember. I remember.
No, the world will never be "the same." But that just means the world we live in today is the only one we have.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:23 AM | Comments (0)
September 8, 2006
Getting Hotter
The Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC has finally launched its first outdoor WiFi hotspot, more than two years after Open Park, a non-profit group I'm involved with, offered to deploy free WiFi access across the National Mall.
For reasons that remain mysterious, the Smithsonian rejected Open Park's efforts, and instead is hiring vendors to deploy more limited WiFi access. There are only a limited number of antenna locations on the Mall, and the Smithsonian controls most of them, which makes them the key bottleneck for any public wireless access.
It's a shame Open Park's efforts were stymied. Still, it's nice to see at least some progress is being made toward a wireless commons on the National Mall.
Open Parks's website has the whole story.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 11:48 AM
September 7, 2006
The Broadband Facts
From Dave Burstein's always informative DSL Prime newsletter:
"Empirically, the world leaders [in broadband] were built with strong regulation in France, Korea, Japan - and China."
Why does unregulated competition in telecom work so well in theory, but so poorly in practice?
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 1:23 PM | Comments (3)
Sun's Project Mercury
Cringely has a new column out discussing Jonathan Schwartz's Project Mercury intitiative at Sun. The basic idea is to drop the price of Sun's entireprise hardware in return for service commitments. Cringely is skeptical this will work, but for entirely operational reasons: he doesn't think Sun can realign the incentives of its employees, particularly the sales force. That's a real challenge, but it's one Jonathan expressly acknowledges in him email. Sun needs to get the execution right, but that doesn't make the strategy wrong.
The broader question I have is just what's so novel here. IBM has for years thrived by emphasizing services and open source, to the detriment of proprietary hardware margins, and HP has basically copied that strategy. Apple does the same in the consumer market, using iTunes, automatic software updates, and .Mac as the lynchpins of its resurgence.
I think I'm missing something. And it's not just something about Sun, it's something about the future model for the IT industry.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 1:05 PM