The Brookings Institution held a forum this morning on “Fostering Internet Competition“—at which, oddly, many panelists seemed resigned to the idea that one layer or another of the Internet would not be competitive: The question, as they saw it, was how to regulate the monopoly player at one layer to foster competition at the next layer up.
For Loyola University law professor Spencer Waller, it is online social platforms like Facebook and Twitter and Google that raise the specter of monopoly, and the question is how to regulate them so as to ensure competition and innovation in services built atop these platforms. Harvard’s Susan Crawford thought the application layer could probably take care of itself, provided the monopolisticphysical infrastructure—the means of providing broadband connectivity to end users—was properly regulated. Only one panelist, media theorist Doug Rushkoff, seemed interested in the possibility of fostering competition all the way down—he was, rather astonishingly, the first to utter the phrase “mesh networking” at the very end of the question and answer period. The others—as revealed by frequent analogies to electric grids and interstate highways—seemed stuck in a model that failed to take seriously what is probably the most important fact about Internet policy: Technology moves faster than politics.
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