March 15th, 2006
In a perfect world, Larry Lessig would be on the FCC
I have often felt that Stanford University law professor Larry Lessig would make a great Federal Communications Commission member.
Not only is Lessig unwilling to give the copyright absolutists and the cable and telephony monopolists unfettered power, but he is a battler for innovation.
Those attributes make Lessig anathema to the bottom-line obsessed power-wielders and influence peddlers that run so much of our communications infrastructure today. For that reason, he would never ben nominated for the FCC.
But those attributes make Lessig a thought-leader sought after by organizers for many convocations, such as the Spring VON show in San Jose.
Creativity is enhanced by less-than-perfect control over what content is on the network," Lessig said during a conference kickoff speech yesterday.
Lessig added that without net neutrality provisions that would prohibit surcharges by broadband Internet service providers to creators and users of high bandwidth, "you would be able to innovate only as you get permission from the network owner."
"The Internet produced by end-to-end applications is more valuable to the economy than the network that gets produced under AT&T ownership," he added.
In Lessig’s professorial way, that’s getting in AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre’s face. Whitacre is front and center among the broadband titans who feel they should have the right to charge large bandwidth users extra carriage fees to use their network.
Fight the power, Larry Lessig. Fight the powers that fee.
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
