[ale] OPEC 2.0 - op-ed on bandwidth from todays NYT

[aaron]

Bandwidth is the word of the day.  My life partner forwarded this
other NYT op-ed in to me this morning.

The solution conclusions are still the standard, self serving corporate
fraud of blaming and vilifying regulation,  so we can't even trust the
New York Times to step outside the greed driven propaganda of the
corporate monopoly media, BUT...

The article does manage to still make some good points about the
dangers of allowing extortionist corporate monopolies to control
supplies of essential services like bandwidth.

peace
aaron


=====================
Op-Ed Contributor
OPEC 2.0
 By TIM WU
Published: July 30, 2008

AMERICANS today spend almost as much on bandwidth — the capacity to
move information — as we do on energy. A family of four likely spends
several hundred dollars a month on cellphones, cable television and
Internet connections, which is about what we spend on gas and heating
oil.

Just as the industrial revolution depended on oil and other energy
sources, the information revolution is fueled by bandwidth. If we
aren't careful, we're going to repeat the history of the oil industry
by creating a bandwidth cartel.

Like energy, bandwidth is an essential economic input. You can't run
an engine without gas, or a cellphone without bandwidth. Both are also
resources controlled by a tight group of producers, whether oil
companies and Middle Eastern nations or communications companies like
AT&T, Comcast and Vodafone. That's why, as with energy, we need to
develop alternative sources of bandwidth.

Wired connections to the home — cable and telephone lines — are the
major way that Americans move information. In the United States and in
most of the world, a monopoly or duopoly controls the pipes that
supply homes with information. These companies, primarily phone and
cable companies, have a natural interest in controlling supply to
maintain price levels and extract maximum profit from their
investments — similar to how OPEC sets production quotas to guarantee
high prices.

But just as with oil, there are alternatives. Amsterdam and some
cities in Utah have deployed their own fiber to carry bandwidth as a
public utility. A future possibility is to buy your own fiber, the way
you might buy a solar panel for your home.

Encouraging competition is another path, though not an easy one: most
of the much-hyped competitors from earlier this decade, like
businesses that would provide broadband Internet over power lines, are
dead or moribund. But alternatives are important. Relying on monopoly
producers for the transmission of information is a dangerous path.

After physical wires, the other major way to move information is
through the airwaves, a natural resource with enormous potential. But
that potential is untapped because of a false scarcity created by bad
government policy.

Our current approach is a command and control system dating from the
1920s. The federal government dictates exactly what licensees of the
airwaves may do with their part of the spectrum. These Soviet-style
rules create waste that is worthy of Brezhnev.

Many "owners" of spectrum either hardly use the stuff or use it in
highly inefficient ways. At any given moment, more than 90 percent of
the nation's airwaves are empty.

The solution is to relax the overregulation of the airwaves and allow
use of the wasted spaces. Anyone, so long as he or she complies with a
few basic rules to avoid interference, could try to build a better
Wi-Fi and become a broadband billionaire. These wireless entrepreneurs
could one day liberate us from wires, cables and rising prices.

Such technologies would not work perfectly right away, but over time
clever entrepreneurs would find a way, if we gave them the chance. The
Federal Communications Commission promised this kind of reform nearly
a decade ago, but it continues to drag its heels.

In an information economy, the supply and price of bandwidth matters,
in the way that oil prices matter: not just for gas stations, but for
the whole economy.

And that's why there is a pressing need to explore all alternative
supplies of bandwidth before it is too late. Americans are as addicted
to bandwidth as they are to oil. The first step is facing the problem.

== [Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School and the co-author of
"Who Controls the Internet?"