Passed on with permission of Dave Hughes
-----Original Message----- From: Telecom Regulation & the Internet [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Dave Hughes Sent: Sunday, January 15, 2006 11:11 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [CYBERTEL] Paradise Lost Since the Denver Bronco's beat the New England Patriots last night to let me enjoy this Sunday morning in sweet solitude, I want to ask a philosophical question that puzzles and disturbs me still. David Reed mused on one of these lists after I mentioned the spread of the 'do it yourself' Wi-Fi phenomenon, about also the other technologies that have become 'standard' like RJ45s, Ethernets (I would even add RJ11, which made do-it yourself modems pluggable, and opened the door to dial up even long before PPP connections unlike what one encounters in Europe and Asia with hard wired telephones) that go way back to the American Carterphone decision and earlier. i.e. that many small innovations, along with the first PCs - Apple and Radio Shack, even before IBM PCs, and their RS232 connectors, that became defacto 'standard' in the connectivity industry had a huge amount to do with the explosion of the 'personal and individual' Information nee Internet Age that has now spread round the world. I can't see any other country having invented and succeeded, politically, in selling the 'personal' computer. So today sitting at their super cheap (for their power and flexibility) personal computers and the software that runs on them empowering individuals with 'information, manipulation, text, science, sound, image, communications creativity unprecedented in human history. A miracle of what the unregulated (except for fringe issues of safety and emissions approval) the US personal computer and software industry has wrought putting them in the reach of all 300 million Americans. And having been adopted or emulated all over the world. But in person to person, one to many, many to one, person to organization, COMMUNICATIONS we read and hear of reports of what is going on in other countries, European and Asian. We see even how many 3d World nations are eagerly and successfully connecting up the most remote peoples. (Three days ago I am able to be interviewed here in my home office for over two and a half HOURS by an Italian Journalist in Milan doing an in-depth profile for their version of the Wall Street Journal, using Skype - essentially free - and with voice quality the entire time SUPERIOR to any phone call local to world I can in ANY other way. Personal computer to personal computer. A feat unprecedented in human communications history. Yet the muscle-bound US is way down the list of connectivity opportunities per capita when compared with some others, including Japan and Korea! And as these maillists report in dismal regulatory, political, legal, detail, all the sustained efforts of the giant obsolescent teleco corporations to try - and arm twist local, state, and the federal government - to help them control, dominate, dictate to (one way content), gouge, Americans - the country of political freedoms, individuality, market economics, private property rights, and the creativity and innovations that goes along with it. This, in a country where Americans have always had a fuzzy good feeling and celebrates 'small business,' individual entrepreneurship, bootstrap young people into millionaires, yet are generally suspicious of, and rarely like, much less love, big business. And absolutely hate most of the telecom companies - including the telcos and cable companies. (with reason). In fact the economic and employment growth of the US that can be attributed to small business, a growing proportion of which stems from Information Age economics - services, products (software) delivered or 'produced' on 'personal' computers - while the giant industrial age companies struggle, go into bankruptcy. Which even leads mighty Alan Greenspan and the 'Feds' to 'discover' the hidden reason for our sustained economic success, even in the face of lots of other problems - 9/11 and collapse of the .dot com speculative bubble, is the rising 'productivity' of Americans, who always were hard working, but now with 7 League Boots of computers produce more per person that any other nation in the world! So WHY, with all this objective reality - love of entrepreneurial small business inventive Americans, hatred of would-be controlling big business (as much as if not more that distrust and resistance to government itself) has there not been an outright revolution against the giant telcos? Why hasn't there been a recognition - 25 years after the personal computer, personal global communications, personal Internet - by Congressperns, Administrations, FCCs, economists, media ALL OF WHOM PERSONALLY USE AND BENEFIT IMMENSLY FROM THESE SAME TOOLS that freed-up communications in the country of 'free speech' - wired, fibered, wireless, no license digital wireless - can yet vault the US permanently into the forefront of technological, thus economic, leadership? Why are half the brains of influential Americans clinging to a dying communications past, while the other half boldly presses on into their, and our, digital future? (Utterly apart from the self, and stockholder interests of the Telco/Cablecos - which hardly benefits or harms the majority of Americans who neither work for these companies nor hold stock in them.) Why the hell, philosophically, are we, as a nation, Prometheus Bound? What the hell has gone wrong in our electronic and digital genes? Why is there in America, of all places, the EXTREME contradiction of the freedom of personal computers and the would-be slavery of personal digital communications? While yet other nations are explosively benefiting by both? Nuts. I have spoiled my own Sunday morning. Dave Hughes [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
