December 10th, 2008
Nortel makes the case against Kevin Martin
What does the case against Kevin Martin mean for open source?
On the surface not a lot. It’s easy to dismiss the report by a Democratic committee against a Republican regulator as a political hit.
But there is a connection, and the pending bankruptcy of Nortel provides it.
Just as you can dismiss the former as political, you can dismiss the latter as a Cisco buying opportunity.
Except even Cisco, a well-run company by all accounts, is seeing slower growth, even rumors of lay-offs.
What we have seen under Martin, and to an extent under his predecessor, Michael Powell, is a concentration of Internet capacity into fewer-and-fewer hands.
This deliberate unraveling of the 1996 Telecommunications Act has had another side-effect, the deliberate violation of Moore’s Law.
Thanks to applications of silicon technology to optical fiber and radios, Moore’s Law applies to the online world as much as it does the PC on your desk.
Costs for moving bits have been falling throughout the decade, and the capacity to move them has increased, exponentially.
Yet we are still paying just as much to move bits as we ever did, at the retail level, because there is no competition in their sale. Enabling such competition, following the law, is the job of the FCC, and that job has not been done.
The concentration of Internet market power in the hands of a few corporations has had the knock-on effect of limiting the market for suppliers.
Rather than throwing money at the problem, as the Obama Administration seems to be suggesting, a simple reversal of our regulatory course, in favor of competition, should unleash Moore’s Law and put us back on the path to broadband progress.
Kevin Martin, and the monopolists behind him, are impeding that progress. Nortel’s bankruptcy, not the House Committee, is the proof.
Reverse course, bring growth back to the Internet, and this medium, under open standards, will bring growth back to the economy.
As to what that new regulatory direction should be, start here.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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