I will, hopefully, have time in the near future to write up my farewell to Kevin Martin and assessment of his term as Chairman of the FCC. In the meantime, I think Commissioner Copps gives a good assessment and farewell.
As I say, I hope to have more to say later. For now, I will simply say that I have enormous respect for Kevin Martin and for what he tried to accomplish, even when I disagreed with him.
More below . . .
I like to think I’m particularly adaptable on those occasions when I happen to recognize that I need to be, but I perpetually feel inadequate in recognizing when the rules of the universe have changed. That’s a pretty significant skill to be lacking when you’re trying to invent the future.
So it is with even more than the usual range of emotions that I have come to “sell” our home in Wisconsin and will finally be moving to California. I am told that this is an extraordinary accomplishment, but I’ve “adapted” so much, the celebration has a Pyrrhic cast.
The US housing market has all but ceased to exist as a functioning market with any sort of liquidity. In my neighborhood, there should statistically be about one home sale each week. Ours was the seventh in the previous eight months, and I think all of those were the previous calendar year. The issue seems to be that every sale is contingent on having the buyers sell their home, which isn’t happening, so the whole country is waiting for one big circle jerk. Many housing industry folks are claiming that prices have not fallen much, but that’s disingenuous – the average selling price nationally and in most areas hasn’t fallen much only because the average home size continues to rise. The average price per square foot of any particular existing fixed-size house is dropping like a stone in a still pond. (Areas that do not see average housing sizes grow have indeed been seeing a big drop in average selling price.) And with bankers knowing this and knowing that several hundred of their ilk are being carted off by the FBI – no I’m not making this up – they’re not making a lot of bridge loans that would allow folks to buy one house before they sell the next.
So here’s what we did:
Greetings gentle reader! Welcome to another chapter in my occasional series “What All Policy Wonks Need to Understand About Economics So They Can Spot The Industry Baloney” aka “The Econ 101 Gut Check.”
In today’s lesson, we look at two concepts often confused with one another. UBIQUITY, which means how widely available something is; and SUBSTITUTIBALITY, which means whether people regard one thing as a substitute for their first choice. Most arguments for deregulation of the media and the internet rest on confusing these related but very different concepts. For example, the argument that the availability of video clips on YouTube or other types of content creation confuses ubiquity and substitubality, as does the argument that cellphones compete with DSL and cable for broadband access.
But according to this USA Today article (reporting on this study by the PEW Internet and American life project), teenagers who actually use this stuff on a regular basis understand the differences perfectly. And if regulators, policy types, or even just folks who care about getting it right for its own sake want to get our national media and broadband polices right, then we better learn from these teenagers and get the difference between ubiquity and substitutibility straight.
Class begins below . . . .
Back in 2004-05, a bunch of us fought to open up the 3650-3700 MHz band for unlicensed use (Sometimes refered to as 3.65 GHz rather than 3650 MHz). While we did not get “pure” unlicensed, the FCC’s “hybrid unlicensed” regime gave us pretty much everything we wanted.
In August 2005, a group of tech firms led by Intel filed a Petition for Reconsideration. This group, which I dubbed the “WiMax Posse,” wanted the Commission to reverse itself and optimize the band for WiMax operations. Notably, this meant adopting a licensing regime instead of the open spectrum rules we won in March 2005.
By this time, Powell had left and been replaced with Kevin Martin. Martin had earned the eternal scorn of Netheads by deregulating DSL (actually a process begun by Powell). And, unlike Powell, Martin had no record of support for open spectrum. So even though the WiMax Posse and the various licensed wireless providers who came in to support them raised no new arguments, no one knew whether Martin would reaffirm the 2005 rules or side with the licensed spectrum/WiMax posse.
So I let out a huge sigh of relief and felt a modest sense of accomplishment when the FCC issued an Order denying the WiMax Posse Recon Petition and basically reaffirming our March 2005 win. Commissioner Adelstein had a very nice concurring statement highlighting the important roll played by WISPs and Community Wireless Networks (CWNs) in getting wireless connectivity to rural and underserved urban communities.
So what does this mean for wireless deployment for WISPs, CWNs, and muni systems? How do I read the FCC tea leaves in light of last month’s FCC decision terminating two important open spectrum proceedings? See below . . . .
My wife recently made this video about our fight to stop a high-voltage power line proposed in our neighborhood. It was a lot of work.
She put copies onto DVDs with nice printed labels for distribution. I would have thought that seeing the physical product would give us a sense of completion and having accomplished something. It was nice, but it didn’t quite close the effort.
Then we uploaded the bits to Google Video and waited for review before it was accessible. And waited. And waited. And then one day we just checked to see if it was up. Bingo! We watched it over and over again. I was struck by how much greater the sense of accomplishment in seeing the video up on Google, available for world-wide viewing.
This is the new distribution. This is the Age of Imagination.
