[governance] Fwd: [IP] Re Speech by ITU Secretary-General - Canadian Wireless Telecommunication Association Wireless Antenna Sitting Forum : Closing Keynote Speech

[michael gurstein]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bob Frankston 
Date: Saturday, May 5, 2012
Subject: Re Speech by ITU Secretary-General - Canadian Wireless
Telecommunication Association Wireless Antenna Sitting Forum : Closing
Keynote Speech
To: dave at farber.net

"Everyone wants mobile broadband and the benefits it will bring. But few
seem willing to pay for it - including both the over-the-top players, who
are generating vast new demand through their applications, and consumers,
who have become accustomed to unlimited packages." 

This is a classic problem we see when the old guard confronts a new framing.
The ITU may want to reconcile with the Internet but they are living in the
wrong paradigm. This is not about whether we are willing to pay for
infrastructure, it's about how we pay for it. This is like listening to a
railroad magnate trying to figure out how to pay for roads and sidewalks
because people aren't willing to buy a ticket each time they take a walk.

This is not about capital markets as such. It is simply foolish for anyone
to invest in a for-profit telecommunications infrastructure. There may be
exceptions, just as there are private roads, but limiting commerce in order
to make a roads a profit center make no sense. Today we have a regulatory
system which supports profligate redundancy rather than providing capacity
but the problems cited show that that model isn't really working for us.

The answer is painfully obvious - don't do that. Don't charge for "bits" as
if they had value. Instead pay for common infrastructure like we pay for
sidewalks. By funding the whole out of the value to society we solve the
problem of mapping value to payments.

Without the need to keep capacity locked away simply to create billable
events we will not only discover that capital markets will open up, we'll
find that we have far less need for capital because we can take advantage of
the vast capacity already available within the gated world of
telecommunications.

But how can the ITU find solutions when those solutions challenge their
members' business models?

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