George Gilder on Telecommunications Policy

Codeine writes "The Testimony of Mr. George Gilder to the Telecommunications Policy: A Look Ahead hearing held by the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation strongly supports the idea [of] mandated 'open access' to the logical layers of the network, and it is embodied in a new legislative proposal by MCI, A Horizontal Leap Forward: Formulating a New Public Policy Framework Based on the Network Layers Model. The success of the layered model in the LAN environment, migrated to the WAN."

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from the article

[strook]

Too long and dense, here's a summary.

The basic theme is, America is supposed to be the home of everything great. Our vice president invented the internet for christ's sake. So why don't we have the best access for consumers?

"The U.S. now ranks eleventh internationally in residential "broadband" access. Using the FCC's silly 200-kilobit-per-second definition, some now say that 25 percent of American homes have broadband. But by the standards of Asia--where most citizens enjoy access speeds 10 times faster than our fastest links--U.S. residences have no broadband at all. U.S. businesses have far less broadband than South Korean residences. South Korea, for instance, has 40 times the per capita bandwidth of the U.S. Japan is close behind Korea, and countries from China to Italy are removing obstacles to the deployment of vDSL, fiber-to-the-home, and broadband wireless networks."

Gilder thinks our government's mucking things up:
"The Telecom Act of 1996... turned into a million-word re-regulation of the industry. Regulatory actions by the FCC and the 51 state utility commissions greatly exacerbated the bad parts of the Act and distorted many of the good parts."

MCI has a new proposal: "A horizontal layers approach would supposedly be a radical shift from the "vertical silos" approach now used, where telephony, cable, and wireless, for example, are regulated based on historical industry definitions, not generic functional categories. The common denominator of Internet Protocol (IP)--supposedly the basis for all future communications networks--is said to necessitate the new layered regulatory approach."

Gilder doesn't think reregulation is going to help, and poses some interesting questions: "Should Google be able to leverage search into Gmail, or to supply content using its proprietary algorithms and its physical network of 100,000 servers? Shouldn't any rival search provider be able to feed off of Google's advanced infrastructure? After all, wouldn't it be impossible to recreate Google's massive web of global intelligence? Doesn't Google's superior infrastructure exhibit "market power"? Might Google actually evolve into a general provider of web-based information management services, rivaling the PC-based Microsoft, or should Google be "quarantined" as a search provider? Or maybe we should structurally separate Google into three companies: an infrastructure provider (its 100,000 networked servers plus algorithmic IP), a content/advertising company, and an information services company (Gmail plus future knowledge management applications). Surely FCC bureaucrats can make these easy distinctions and explain the resulting penalties to weary entrepreneurs who have just spent 10 years of their life building a new service that people really like."

His conclusion: "The real threat to monopolize and paralyze the Internet is not the communications industry and its suppliers, but the premature modularizers and commoditizers, the proponents of the dream of some final government solution for the uncertainties of all life and commerce."

Gilder opposes layering, open access, competition

[isdnip]

The original post is wrong. It implies that Gilder supports the MCI position. But Gilder's testimony opposes it. Gilder is, like many extreme right-wingers, a fan of unregulated monopolies. He does not believe that monopolies should be regulated; he thinks that technology will magically render them powerless. His record in picking technology investments, however, is rather spotty, to be charitable.

In Gilder's world, the incumbent telephone companies, who had government-granted monopolies, should be allowed to have total control over their usage and content. No competing ISPs, no uncensored web sites, no competing web merchants, if that's what the monopoly wants. If they want to charge $100/month plus $5/hour for dial-up access, fine. Anything else is, to him, excessive government regulation. He'd permit somebody else, of course, to string new wires on the street, but the impracticality of that is not his problem.

He should be relegated to the dumpster of other failed nut case prophets, and left with his fellow creationists to ponder the problems of a world where scientists and rational thinkers are allowed to question his faith.