An Inconvenient Truth . . . About Digital Communications

It's a commodity business.

No matter how incumbent providers try to steer the issue and put lipstick on their digital-porkbellies - "triple play", "video services", "voice services", etc. - it cannot change the fact that what they do is move IP packets from point A to point B (Eli Noam is simply wrong on this, a bit really is a bit).

What's disappointing is that the FCC is the major cosmetics supplier to the digital-porkbelly lipstick market and - Chevron aside - 6 out of 9 Supreme Court Justices are so impressed with the make-up job, they fail to recognize that what they're looking at is in fact merely the digital equivalent of porkbellies.

At some point US regulators are going to have to come to grips with this fact (to use J. Scalia's terminology) and re-assess their "services" based regulatory regime, which simply doesn't apply to a digital communications framework. Unfortunately, by the time we get around to correcting our misguided regulatory regime, it'll be too late. The rest of the world are moving to a utilities-like model (paying for broadband much as we pay for water or electricity), while US consumers continue to pay obscene fees for the digital equivalent of "shower services", "toilet services", and "kitchen-sink services" (instead of paying the digital water utility bill).

Like climate change, we're in a race against time; i.e. the rest of the world are not merely "catching-up", they've set a pace to outstrip the US in broadband penetration - and MANY ALREADY HAVE! Future generations in the US will curse us for our myopic outlook and protection of incumbent industries that weren't agile enough (or patriotic enough) to adapt their creaking business models to the realities - facts - of a digital world.

Call me a pessimist, but it's already too late to offset the damage our regulatory myopia has done thus far . . . the real question is, HOW BAD WILL IT GET BEFORE WE DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT?