For several years, public policy has not been a major factor in our industry. The wave of deregulation in public telecom that began in 1996 had run its course by the middle of last decade. Much of the attendant consolidation of the largest carriers had been completed by the mid-2000s, and at the same time, spectrum auctions had opened up new swaths of bandwidth to enable smartphone-based services to deliver on the promise that the devices themselves offered. At the same time, debates about Net Neutrality had pretty much died down, and the Internet itself seemed to be moving forward incrementally--all the recent talk about the "Internet of Things" notwithstanding.
But 2014 could be a year when public policy comes to the fore once again, which makes it also worth considering whether public policy should be playing an even greater role in how communications and the Web move to their next stage in the U.S.
The first effects are likely to come at the FCC, which this month begins work on the potential decommissioning of the legacy PSTN. As I posted recently, this is a process that enterprises should follow closely; among the proposed methods for trialing the cutoff of TDM services is a plan submitted by AT&T that would shutter these services in the near term in a few selected geographic areas, to test the technical and regulatory issues that arise when PSTN retirement goes live. Obviously, if your enterprise has locations in the affected areas, you'll need to know how these sites may be impacted.
But I also wanted to write about the importance of public policy because of something that Tom Nolle wrote in his latest No Jitter post. Tom was addressing the fact that there just doesn't seem to be a lot of innovation in networking/communications these days, and he proposed a couple of technology-based ideas for how to rekindle innovation. But his final suggestion centered around public policy: "Provide an investment tax credit for network applications that are not ad-sponsored." Tom is (rightly, in my view) skeptical of the value that yet another freemium Web-based service adds to our economy or our industry--while at the same time these services hollow out the value proposition of more potentially durable applications.
Without action to discourage these low-value, freemium services, he writes, the prevailing attitude will be one that seeks to commoditize the ecosystem: "Ask somebody what a 'better' Internet is, and the net of their response is 'faster for less'".
I think Tom's idea is worthy, but I don't harbor any illusion that it, or any other such idea, will get very far. The first, most obvious reason is that the political challenges in Washington simply won't allow it; maybe someplace like California or Texas that works hard to nurture its high-tech industries could take the lead at a state level.
The larger issue, however, is that what Tom's really suggesting is that we upend the most basic principle of the Internet as it has evolved: "Faster, better, cheaper" has always been the mantra, but if we can only pick two of those, we tend to go with "faster" and "cheaper," and we let those two together become our definition of "better."
There's really not much room for actual "better" in most Web applications--unless you're talking about better for the website providers and the advertisers they're chasing. For them, "better" means better ways of capturing your information and attention, which you turn over to them in place of giving them money.
So next year will be a time for the industry to focus on public policy, at least at the public network level. It's coming our way, and we need to be ready. If we could be proactive, that'd be even better--but I'm not holding my breath.
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