Just a trial baloon, want to see what you all think...
Owning a communications network is rather like being the in posession of Tolkien's Ring. It slowly corrupts and drives mad the keeper. "I'll capture your value, all my beautiful bits, preciousssss bits".
The temptation to look inside the packets, to demand tribute from the greater force of user innovation -- it always becomes too much in the end. Commercial insanity, or loss of all moral bearings in conduct of business all too often result.
Yet there's a way to neutralize the wicked force, to douse the heart's unclean desires. The pool of lava is the nature of the funding, ownership and pricing of the network. The different roles involved (rights of way, capital raising, capacity management, deployment, maintenance, support, retail, etc.) need to be slowly teased out, and allowed to evolve their own economics.
Now this may sound like the traditional "layered" approaches to regulation.
But there's more. I think that layers are a necessary, but not sufficient, part of rethinking how we create our communications infrastructure. For example, spectrum management rules that favour particular applications are just as harmful (if not more so) than a telco's transient price-discrimination efforts.
Capitalism normally does a good job of aligning the needs of buyers and sellers. Make a better widget and the world is yours. Capitalism is built from certain legal and financial building blocks. Contract law, tort, competition law. Property rights. Stable currencies to enable exchange of value over time as well as space. Freedom of expression is part too -- the message "better widgets! over here!" is an essential part of "the market".
But I feel we're not there yet. We've created many new "ownership" and "transaction" technologies over time. Limited-liability corporations, partnerships, co-operatives; equities, debt and derivatives.
We just don't have the mechanics to deal with a networked world and mass-participation in that network. Municipal networks are controversial because the only co-ordination mechanism is the force of government and the state. This is crude and dangerous; we contaminate the network with the power to tax, and the centuries of fighting we've undertaken to limit and mollify that urge.
What we're lacking is new forms of organisational, ownership and financial technology. It's how you align the interests of owners and users that counts. You'd complain quick enough about TV companies getting "free" spectrum if it affected your "spectrum dividend" cheque at the end of the year.
Once those interests of users and owners better align, the temptation to worship the Ring -- the false power over the passage of other people's information -- vanishes forever.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 7:01 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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