Technology Futures

The Wall Street Journal reports that FCC Chairman Michael Powell has stepped down as head of that agency.

The past four years for the FCC have been rocky ones. The FCC has lurched from one decision to another, sometimes favoring users of telecom services, but too often seeming to coddle the corporate dinosaurs of telecom. Trying to walk a line between the two is probably the worst job in Washington, and that has to be factored in when evaluating Powell's performance.

The bigger and more important issue for me has been this: What is the national policy on broadband? Powell, the FCC, and the Bush administration have never answered that beyond pablum that can be boiled down to "Broadband is good."

It's hard to imagine why we would even need an FCC ten years from now, and the new head of the FCC would do great good by announcing that his job is to shut the agency down over an appropriate period of time. Doing so would unleash a great wave of investment and entreprneurship because companies would finally know that they would not be hampered in the future by capricious regulations from Washington.

If the Federal government has a role, and I think it does, it's a simple one. Instead of the piecemeal approach to trying to help communities with broadband, the Federal government should simply fund very high bandwidth, interstate, long haul fiber routes, exactly the way it does with interstate highway projects.

And like the interstate highway system, it would have profound, and mostly positive effects on the economy, because unlike the highway system, small communities everywhere would have a chance to hook up to a world class Internet backbone. If you are interested in the how this might look at a local, state, and national level, take a look at my paper on this topic--Connecting the Dots for 2007 and Beyond.

Here is a very readable article that explains some of the differences between the popular but still more expensive LCD panels and the older but now very cheap CRT-based monitors. LCD prices have fallen dramatically, and CRTs are now dirt cheap--just a few years ago, a 17" CRT was $600 or more, and you can now find them for $100 if you shop around. One nice advantage of LCDs is that they are easier on the eyes, as they do not flicker like CRTs, and they don't produce ionizing radiation like CRTs.

SpaceShipOne won the $10 million X Prize by being the first private space vehicle to make a round trip to suborbital space twice in two weeks. But more money has been put up by hotel mogul Robert Bigelow. Fifty million is the next prize, for the first private spaceship to take five people to orbit twice in two weeks.

Bigelow wants bigger spacecraft to fill his space hotels. He's been working on the concept for years. What is really interesting is that much of the private development is being funded by Internet billionaires. Wired has the full article. The Internet is laying the seeds for the greatest economic expansion in the history of the world. When the Space Economy begins to kick in, about ten years from now, the business opportunities and new businesses it will create will dwarf the dot-com expansion. It will also be more solid, because unlike the dot-com companies, you won't be able to go to space with a business plan and a Web site. It will take solid, careful development work and a lot of sweat, tears, risk, and yes, even death. Space has been, is, and will continue to be a risky business. But it won't stop our children, who will have their eyes on the stars.

The City Council of St. Paul, Minnesota has approved a study to consider the feasibility of citywide wireless broadband.

The three month study will look for "the common good" that might be gained from community-managed telecom infrastructure. This is, as far as I know, the first time the common good has been explicity acknowledged in this kind of study. It has been implicitly part of many other community telecom projects, but it's about time we started this particular conversation in more earnest.

What has dominated the discussion so far has been the "unfairness" of community telecom projects, all viewed through the lens of monopoly telecom providers. Using that yardstick, community water systems are "unfair" because someone might want to build their own, private water system. Public sanitation would be "unfair" because someone might want to get into the sewer business. Our legislators and government officials need to start thinking more clearly about these issues.