Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Important Spectrum for Sale by FCC
Here's an article on it, and a few good questions by the technologically gifted.
If you think this doesn't affect you, consider that this is about who gets to control a critical portion of your COMMUNICATION CHANNEL to the world. In essence, if the corporation(s) who purchase this frequency segment practice monopolistic practices--a likelihood, since the FCC is likely to push forward with this auction WITHOUT the requirement of the buyer offering open services and open networks. I say its a likelihood the monopolistic companies will get this because Google or any other company that wants to "be nice" by making things open (a real incentive to innovation) is not going to be able to pony up the tens of billions of dollars to buy this space, and even if they did, they'd need to be cutthroat in their practices in order to make that money back--as a publicly-traded company, Google is kind of obliged to please their stockholders a little, though I remember in their IPO they had some caveats built into their stock system that gave them more leeway than a standard company would--I hope that still applies.
America is getting to a real point of falling behind technologically, compared to Europe and Japan. We're still apparently ahead of China and the developing world, but I wonder what it will take for Americans (myself included) to wake up. When we see Japanese people with flying cars, jetpacks, and a rich cyberspace that's not just another place for corporations to advertise at us, while we're still trying to figure out how to make our laptop connect to our iPod and have control over the songs we own?
Here's an Onion article kind of describing the path America is on (caution, stinging satire ahead): Earthquake Sets Japan Back to 2147. My favorite quote: "The United States' offer of $20 million and a shipment of steel, tractors, forklifts, and cranes was politely declined."
lyrics: 'I know what you're thinking. I haven't been drinking. ' -Crash Test Dummies
colors: Pringles can red.
mood: in-between. liminal if you will..
chant/prayer/mantra: let the kissing festival begin!
pax hominibus,
joel
If you think this doesn't affect you, consider that this is about who gets to control a critical portion of your COMMUNICATION CHANNEL to the world. In essence, if the corporation(s) who purchase this frequency segment practice monopolistic practices--a likelihood, since the FCC is likely to push forward with this auction WITHOUT the requirement of the buyer offering open services and open networks. I say its a likelihood the monopolistic companies will get this because Google or any other company that wants to "be nice" by making things open (a real incentive to innovation) is not going to be able to pony up the tens of billions of dollars to buy this space, and even if they did, they'd need to be cutthroat in their practices in order to make that money back--as a publicly-traded company, Google is kind of obliged to please their stockholders a little, though I remember in their IPO they had some caveats built into their stock system that gave them more leeway than a standard company would--I hope that still applies.
America is getting to a real point of falling behind technologically, compared to Europe and Japan. We're still apparently ahead of China and the developing world, but I wonder what it will take for Americans (myself included) to wake up. When we see Japanese people with flying cars, jetpacks, and a rich cyberspace that's not just another place for corporations to advertise at us, while we're still trying to figure out how to make our laptop connect to our iPod and have control over the songs we own?
Here's an Onion article kind of describing the path America is on (caution, stinging satire ahead): Earthquake Sets Japan Back to 2147. My favorite quote: "The United States' offer of $20 million and a shipment of steel, tractors, forklifts, and cranes was politely declined."
lyrics: 'I know what you're thinking. I haven't been drinking. ' -Crash Test Dummies
colors: Pringles can red.
mood: in-between. liminal if you will..
chant/prayer/mantra: let the kissing festival begin!
pax hominibus,
joel
