Wikipedia states that the 1963 movie “It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” was an “epic comedy film,” featuring “an all-star supporting cast, about the madcap pursuit of $350,000…” Fifty years later something similar is playing out amongst communications regulators, a near comedy of denials, justifications, rationalizations, and the ignoring of data all in the madcap pursuit of justifying their role.
We have written before about the FCC ignoring its own data, but even a communications policy layperson can see that the rise of apps has changed the world of communications in the last five years. Yes, it has only been about five years, and already we have an app world.
Health monitoring is an app; text is increasingly an app (in 2012 there were more app texts than SMS messages); video is increasingly an app, as is voice. Yet not long ago there were those calling for more regulation of text. Battles over video go on and on, even while the public increasingly “cuts the cord” and moves to over-the top-video. Did anyone predict these results six years ago? Of course not.
The changes are fundamental, more profound than just receiving the same information, such as voice or text, in a slightly different way. To note just one: The software industry itself is now evolving from being an industry of back-office tools and a means to integrate systems to one that mobile consumers, powered by a robust broadband market and made available from the “cloud” rather than a server down the hall, interact with constantly. The result is that ignoring data, and making politically motivated regulatory decisions, now casts dark shadows far beyond a "plain old telephone service" telephone mounted on a wall.
So regulators struggle. In large part because they fight against the inevitable, trying to keep an ever growing, ever evolving industry in a box built a hundred years ago with too few updates along the way. They struggle because they try to control and conceive regulations before there is a reason to do so, instead of only weighing in when things have truly gone awry.
Regulators still have a role to play today, but it is not the role of the last 50 years. They need to stop, think and truly be humble: They are merely one more group that cannot predict the future and, because of the speed of change, as often as not, can barely grasp the implications now.
But they might be the only group that can consistently clear the way for innovation to thrive and see to it that when the system does run into a real roadblock that it is dealt with effectively, and with minimal invasion into the market.
May 31, 2013