In a speech earlier this week, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps outlined his vision for how the wireless phone market ought to work, as opposed to how it works today.
Of course, it's not the role of government regulators to be designing markets, in some measure because when they do typically their reach exceeds their grasp.
Commissioner Copps is decidedly unhappy that the current state of the wireless market doesn't live up to his imagined ideal of how it should work. But, in fact, a close look at Copps' address reveals that, his imagination is a government control -- FCC control -- his control, his dream. Copps simply thinks that the wireless market ought to work exactly like -- the Internet. But it ought to work like the wireless router business, too. Oh, and it also ought to work like the old monopoly wireline network used to work.
In fact, rather than allowing wireless communications to freely develop into its own unique market, Copps thinks that wireless devices should be nothing more than portable Internet access terminals, and that wireless network providers should simply be providing undifferentiated "dumb pipes."
"It is precisely this layered model that has made the Internet so great. When I switch my broadband provider at home, I don't have to buy a new computer. I get to use all my old software, and I can still access the same content on the Internet. It is high time wireless users and entrepreneurs get to take advantage of this freedom, too," said Commissioner Copps.
One should be concerned that Commissioner Copps apparently thinks the Internet is some sort of gold standard of how things ought to work, because, for at least a week last fall in Brazil, at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), hundreds of Internet engineers and thought leaders pondered the many problems that are being posed by the Internet.
Spam, worms, viruses and phishing have long moved beyond being simple inconveniences, and are in fact a huge problem to Internet users and an enormous expense to network providers--but not to users of wireless phones, precisely because wireless doesn't work like the Internet.
The anonymity of the Internet, which is designed into its very protocol, also facilitates a host of problems. We're all aware of the danger posed to the safety of minors, and we're all aware of the danger of on-line harassment by anonymous Internet users with a grudge or a personality disorder.
In fact, in a recent article in Forbes, Vint Cerf, who helped create the Internet protocol, said that, if he had it to do over again, "I would have established mechanisms to authenticate computers and individuals. I wouldn't have made this mandatory, but I would have made it possible." But in the closed wireless networks, these things are not a problem, again, because they do not work like the Internet.
The Internet is a communications system but not the only one, and an evolving one. So let's not be so naive as to assume that the Internet is Nirvana, and everything else in the world ought to work like the Internet.
Why do so many think the Internet is the ultimate example of how technology ought to work? Because people and businesses quickly adopted the Internet and it became an indispensable part of our lives and our economy.
But isn't the very same thing true of the wireless market? Haven't individuals and business rapidly adopted (and become dependent on) wireless communications at an astounding rate?
Why, then, should the wireless market be forced, through regulatory power, not consumer need or desire, to become more like the Internet?
Is it possible that the wireless communications market should NOT be exactly like the Internet? Is it possible that the way a market works should be driven at least as much by what consumers and providers negotiate with each other through the marketplace, and less by some regulator's uninspired imagination? Is it possible that communications' systems design should also compete in the marketplace and be improved in the fires of competition?
We're just asking . . .