Thursday, December 25, 2003

Kevin Werbach also read Cory's piece, and he quibbles that technology and policy have always been linked. While this is not an invalid point, I think the link between the two has been getting tighter and tighter. Five years ago a broad set of people weren't able to factor in the real capability of the Internet into their thinking (despite the fact that they were sending their stockbrokers all of their money to invest in it). As a result, things like Napster (Kevin's example), got some running room before people started to take it seriously. Now more and more people have seen the patterns of adoption and can extrapolate to the effects. If I were to announce a Napster like service, even one that was a unique application in another space, someone would notice and start to raise questions as soon as my idea was public. Link 12:20:57 AM     trackback []

Cory Doctrow's end of year thoughts with some requests for 2004. I think his assessment of the next 20 years is right on the money. When I was trying to do my top level categories for my blogging the most logical I could come up with was one called "infrastructure", which includes telecom, etc, but also policy as all aspects are becoming inextricably linked. Link 12:13:45 AM     trackback []

Kevin Werbach works through a deployment schedule for fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) by Verizon based on a blurb saying how many houses they'd pass this year. Unfortunately I don't believe his linear extrapolation. Verizon is going to start in the places that are a) easiest and b) have the highest likely subscriber rate for premium services. My guess is that it's probably more like a logarithmic progression, with every year less than the year before. Link 12:10:28 AM     trackback []