Trying to define the elephant

The technical vice president of a cable equipment supplier, the retired director of business development of a Regional Bell operating company, the head of business development of a company attempting to develop industry standards in user interfaces and network services, and the former head of a large software company cum telecommunications guru attempted to get their arms around the amorphous elephant known as telecommunications policy on Wednesday afternoon at Digital World.

Matthew Miller, VP of technology for General Instrument, was a good choice to start off. The cable industry has come late to the three-headed beast of competition vs. First Amendment/Constitutional rights, universal access and diversity vs. the right of the consumer to choose regardless of purported public interests. To the cable industry, the beast is less a matter of policy than one of massively conflicting concerns and a government less attuned to due process and more willing to change the “basic” rules almost daily.

To Ken Thompson, formerly of Ameritech, such concerns were the daily grist of a telephone company’s telecommunications decisions. But to Thompson, the converging technologies and industries of computers and telecommunications signaled that we have outgrown the need for a telecommunications policy and now need a much broader communications policy. This new policy needs to take into account all kinds of stakeholders — from individuals to business and governments — and their very different goals. Policy needed to be appropriate to technological changes, and based on open process.

Michael Bloom, now director of business development for Kaleida Labs, the joint multimedia venture between Apple and IBM, had spent many years working for Pacific Telesis, one of the seven RBOCs. He felt that policy had usually been a negative force, and that new definitions of needs would require a paradigm shift that official processes would not be able to control. As technology progressed, access and transport via computer networks were becoming commodities. Most computer network users can communicate with most other networks today through multiple gateways and over various transmission media. To Bloom, the globalization of telecommunications meant a restructuring of organizations and improvements in cost structures.

Jonathan Seybold interposed and asked whether the panelists could speak of their vision of telecommunications policies. He presented his own short version which included a separation of content from the transmission medium — in other words, those who own networks cannot own what travels over the networks — as well as open access to the network and clearly defined competition between the various “highways” such as cable, telco and satellite.

Mitch Kapor, chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was happy to oblige with his vision of a global, interactive, wide-bandwidth system that was structured under some kind of common carriage principles including nondiscrimination in access (i.e., how one can get hooked up) and content (no control over the user) in an open, public, switched network. This probably requires some bandwidth to be set aside so full competition by new services is possible.

Kapor continues to argue that much of this technology is fundamentally in place (see article covering his keynote, p. 14), but it will take lots of marketing and regulatory openness to make this vision a reality.

Ken Thompson felt that we could come together with a clarity of vision with words like openness, universal and the like, but said that real life is based on specific activities and emotional commitments, which seem left out of most policy discussions.

Looking more closely at the problem, Thompson urged us to consider demand as we make policy. Where is the revenue going to come from to pay for the continual improvements to infrastructure and the expensively produced multimedia products we seem to be assuming will come? What exactly is the market we are talking about serving with advanced communications policies? Where is that extra $10 a month going to come from? He thinks it will take 20 years to achieve 40 percent penetration for these high-bandwidth systems. He argued that the mass market will be a long time coming. Thousands of niches will be the reality on the product development side for a long time to come.

A question from the floor suggested that the costs to implement new capacities might be $2,000 per home, with perhaps only 35 percent of the population being able to afford to participate.

Mitch Kapor noted that it was going to be a gradual process of upgrade and that the figure will probably be more like $1,000 per home.

Matthew Miller also sounded a more pessimistic note when he commented that the new empowerments may not be pretty. Those who obtain capacity and new skills early, usually the more affluent, may go further and faster. Many may indeed be left behind.

Michael Bloom noted that not much legislation is going to help here. Laws are coming after the technology shift.

The consensus:

1. Public policy lags way behind (and generally impedes) changes in technology. When the technology is changing rapidly (as it is now), that lag becomes a very serious problem. Unfortunately, you cannot have “no policy.” Even “no policy” is itself a policy.

2. No one defends our current policy mess.

3. The day is long past when we can afford to treat telephone, cable, wireless, satellite, etc. separately. We need a single, coherent communications policy — one that encourages innovation and competition rather than discourages them.

4. All of this is going to be expensive and complicated. It will take decades to play out (a long time in technological terms, but a short time in terms of the likely impact on society and commerce). We do not have much time to figure out what the policy ground rules should be. The only thing worse than muddled policy is muddled policy that keeps changing.

5. The danger of further stratifying society into technological “haves” and “have-nots” is very real. But, other than insist that schools, public libraries and the like are served, no one knows what to do about it. (It may be either some small consolation or a very sobering thought to remember that television itself was initially an “elitist” medium.)

Tom Hargadon, Jonathan Seybold