PolicyBlog

In “Why Doesn’t Washington Understand the Internet?” (Washington Post, Sunday, January 22, 2012), Rebecca MacKinnon documents how often legislation fails to effectively address problems involving or supposedly caused by the Internet and how often Congress considers or enacts policy solutions that are rapidly outmoded by the continuing innovation that is at the heart of the Internet’s success. The question she asks in her piece is a fair one - but it is also fair to note, as even many who helped... Read More

This was first posted today at Verizon’s At Home blog, where I’ve also placed posts about potential, delivery, and innovation – each related to what I’m seeing on-the-ground from the Consumer Electronics Show this week. Here at CES, it’s a mad house.  I walked the floor Wednesday with thousands of my closest friends, looking for “the next big thing.”I found something better.Thousands of gadgets, hundreds of e-tools, and scores and sores of connected devices.  With some pride I noted how much of... Read More

The following is a guest column I wrote with fellow former Member of Congress Dave McCurdy (D-OK) which ran in the Des Moines Register on 11/12/11.Our rapidly growing national debt has put our country at risk. We used to say that our failure as a nation to make the hard financial decisions would impact the prosperity and wellbeing of our children and grandchildren.Now the future is here. It’s no longer about just our descendants. All of us are likely to soon face the consequences of inaction.If... Read More

I was really wowed at the FCC on Friday.  The Chairman and Commissioner Copps recognized several companies for their cool, innovative products and services that help make communications more accessible to people with disabilities.   Winners included CTIA for their recently launched accesswireless.org website; Apple for their iPhone 4 and 4S; and Universal Subtitles, whose product allows anyone to simply add captioning to any video they post on the Internet, to name just a few.   And Verizon was... Read More

This weekend on the Op-ed pages of The New York Times, Verizon’s CEO Lowell McAdam outlined the tremendous benefit of, and pressing need for, making more wireless spectrum available.  See the link or read below.  ===================================================================Running Out of BandwidthBy LOWELL C. McADAMPublished: October 21, 2011 AT a time of slow economic growth and declining competitiveness, wireless technology remains a shining example of innovation. In the last 10 years,... Read More

Yesterday, there was an interesting exchange on NCTA’s blog between Michael Powell (Former FCC Chairman and current CEO of NCTA) and Gary Shapiro (CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association) about the need for and advisability of so-called “AllVid” rules.  In his blog, Michael does a great job of demonstrating why AllVid rules are not needed.  In defending the need for regulations, Gary pointed out in comments that 15 years ago, the Telecom Act included provisions (Section 629) calling for the... Read More

In addition to the bevy of our marketplace challengers and direct and indirect competitive pressures in our corner of the Internet Ecosystem, there is this.  While consumer demand for the services provided on our world-class networks has never been higher, there are some areas – like home landlines – that are declining as more consumers use other platforms, such as text, social networks, and wireless, to communicate.Couple that landline decrease with the rising cost of health care and you get…... Read More

While I usually concentrate on technology trends in the communications/ICT sector, I do spend a lot of time thinking about government policy issues that have an impact on innovation, job growth and evolution of the tech sector.   Government spending does have as much of an impact on the tech sector as it does on the rest of the economy and one of my strong beliefs when it comes to policy debates is that how we frame the issues – and how we talk about them – has a significant impact on whether... Read More

Broken policy requires level-headed reforms that advance a greater good.  As we have all painfully seen this year in Washington, this is easier said than done. The debate around how to reform the archaic inter-carrier compensation (ICC) and Universal Service systems (USF) seems have been with us forever. Major players have historically never seen eye-to-eye, and in fact couldn’t even agree on the scope or nature of the problems. This has been the downfall of any effort to modernize and... Read More