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| Tuesday, October 29, 2002 |
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Ends without means 
| | But even if Congress had not directed us to re-examine these rules ‹ and even if the court had not made clear that this review must be rigorous ‹ I believe that we cannot be effective as regulators unless we approach all our rules with a similar degree of questioning. The principal thrust of the 1996 Act was that Congress sought to do away with regulation where possible and substitute a reliance on market forces. Of course, this transition cannot occur all at once, and there likely remain a number of areas where continued market intervention is necessary. But my point is that we cannot assume that our regulations will forever serve the goals originally envisioned. To the contrary, as I have explained, the rapid pace of technological and marketplace changes makes it a certainty that many regulations will, at a minimum require tweaking, and ultimately may become obsolete. |
| | On the matter of regulating Internet services, however, she's a bit clearer: |
| | ...we have finally developed a framework that gets beyond the old regulatory silos defined by the analog services of days gone by. There has been much talk of "convergence" over the past several years, and it means different things to different people. To me it means the death of silos. Those legacy service categories — wireline, wireless, cable, and satellite — are rapidly losing their significance as providers from different platforms are competing in each others¹ markets and are all moving closer to providing integrated offerings of voice, data, and video. It means that in crafting regulations we must focus on the functional nature of the service being offered rather than the legacy category to which the provider happened to belong. |
| | Our information service classification does just that. It recognizes that broadband Internet access, regardless of the facilities over which it rides, uses telecommunications as an input but does not provide end users with a pure telecommunications service. By focusing on this critical distinction between a pure transmission service, on the one hand, and transmission plus information processing, on the other, we are able to classify and regulate services based on their functional characteristics rather than the provider¹s traditional role as a cable operator, a telephone company, or even an electric utility. |
| | Key phrase: functional nature of the service. That one needs to be grounded in an understanding that the Net is fundamentally a place, a commons. Not just a "medium" for "delivering content." The two conceptual metaphors invite very different regulatory regimes — one that respects its nature as a marketplace, and one that respects its nature as a medium. |
| | In both cases, we're dealing with an end-to-end nature that welcomes no unneccessary intelligence in the middle. Including the regulatory variety. |
And now so many are dead
| | RageBoy stikes again, with (as usual) one of the best pieces ever on what makes the Net so equally real, unreal and surreal. And I say this not just because he says nice things about me (he says plenty of other things too, and it doesn't have to matter anyway), but because the shit's too good not to blog. My fave paragraph: |
| | The tenaciously popular notion that the Internet is somehow located on the other side of the tracks from the purported Real World is the by-product of limp intellects inhabiting substandard physical vehicles they have repossessed via Tantric Tapdancing, Esoteric Echolalia, and the ingestion of one too many Echinacea cheeseballs. These people are, in short, full of shit. |
| | What's really fucking amazing is that the dude isn't just an enviable writer, but a wooly master of Amazing Visual Shit. In stand-up parlance, he kills. |
Towards smarter blobs
| | What do you call a smart blogging mob? Or a mob of self-smartening bloggers? These questions and others come to mind reading Sheila Lennon's latest, a constructive take on the Möbius 2002 fracas earlier this month. |
It's all downhole from here
Halloween'een'een
| | It's the 29th, which is my cousin Paul Crissman's birthday. Paul is exactly three months younger than me, which seened significant, back somewhere in the last Ice Age. Paul is an uncredited source of many blog items over the years. Much appreciated, too. Happy birthday, old buddy! |
| | Today is also the eve of the eve of All Hallows Eve, the holiday derived from All Souls Day, which the Catholic Church invented to repurpose a pagan holiday that reportedly involved animal sacrifices and worse. |
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