The following continues from remarks I made at a CompTel panel earlier this week on using all available resources to leverage the impact of your message to policy makers. Since I didn’t get to relate the following amazing facts to the audience, I will do so here…
Up until a few years ago, when we began tinkering around with a boat trailer, we used a certain “Old School” method to paint the bottom of one of our boats, a 20 foot skiff. Actually, we had two 20 footers, both made by the same builder, one with a slight deadrise, that went off to a Viking funeral decades ago, and the current one, a flat bottom job, which may weigh slightly less than the deadrise.
Our method went like this: we’d wait for a high tide to beach the boat. Using whichever ancient tractor we had at the time, we’d place rollers under the bow, hitch the tractor to the boat with a rope sling, then haul the boat higher onto level ground. Once level, I could use a pry bar to force under the bow and stern, with a fulcrum, usually a section of log or block, to lift that side of the boat.
The pry bar, the same beat-up 4 x 6 we used every year, and which never seemed to age, has since disappeared, possibly “Isabelled.” I may encounter it on a beach again someday, with a fine “old friend, how do you do?” Using the pry bar as a lever and the log as fulcrum, a 10 year old could lift a boat as high off the ground as so desired, provided that the lifting gains were saved by blocks placed under the chine. I’m pretty sure I was around 10 when the press gang got me, but it may have been earlier still. Record keeping back then was a little spotty.
Getting under the still dripping boat was the worst part of the job, where all the slime scraped off, not to mention bottom copper, was headed straight down, on yours truly, thanks to gravity, and to Murphy too. At any rate, the whole affair was a cheap and surprisingly effective way to haul and paint a boat, provided it wasn’t too big (although bigger could certainly be done), and provided that you don’t mind getting a “little” dirty. Going to “Jumpie’s” marine railway was out of the question.
So it goes with getting your technology message across to policy makers. There are lots of ways of doing this, which is part of the dilemma, but the Old School method works fine. The catch is that if things come down to a crunch, where time is your main enemy, along with any potential opposition that may be using a similar phrase or hook (“regulatory certainty,” “regulatory parity”) to argue for a very different result, you may very well find that as the fulcrum, you are under both the lever (your company or industry sector’s message) and the load to be lifted (rules to be changed or kept, as the case may be). In other words, you’re in a lousy position, and it may very well seem like you are lifting the load (or boat) all by yourself, with no tools, AND from underneath.
One thing I remember about being under the boat, it was always dark, with a sleepy otherworldly kind of feeling, and not altogether unpleasant, once you overlooked where you were, until, say, a fly came along, and bit you on the leg, whereupon you’d jump and hit your head on the bottom, only to come away with even more paint (or bottom slime) on your face than you’d already collected.
Of course, if you have a couple people, or an entire trade association, or even a coalition of associations and industry groups, the whole thing gets a lot easier. We never really had that group of people when painting boats, maybe just one other person, which certainly made things go faster, but I never seemed to find volunteers wanting for the job, and it became a solo effort, pretty much every year.
With the way technology is changing now, and particularly the pace of change, and new uses that seem constantly on the rise – witness the “DIY” for Do It Yourself media explosion, which phenomenon has not yet even begun in earnest, in advertising, film, music, radio, podcasts, and yes, blogs – and you may get a sense of the challenge facing policymakers as they try to sort through all these converging, sometimes competing, or even completely unrelated interests, some burdened with existing regulations and costs, and perhaps chiseled in stone, others unfettered by anything other than imagination and creativity, as fluid as can be, and truly global in orientation.
As I was preparing for this talk, and sharing ideas, someone who knows, being from a trade association (the Telecommunications Industry Association) put things perfectly in perspective: “the world is getting smaller and moving faster.” (Maybe that’s why they named their new trade show GLOBALCOMM…) It’s our job to make some sense out of this, with positive results; that is, to increase consumer choice in communications, to increase the availability and capacity of these tools, so that people feel (if they so choose) that they are able to take advantage of connectivity anytime, anywhere (if they so choose). The trick is to explain how all these pieces fit together, which takes some heavy lifting, to explain the technologies involved, and why they are so important.
Just for the record, we don’t use that complicated method anymore to paint boats. We have progressed to another complicated, more modern method. We now use a boat trailer (for another boat); a front loader tractor with a sling, and some really heavy duty saw horses welded from angle iron. Shinbusters. It’s still straight-up
One interesting aspect of regulatory debates is the “tennis match with a hand grenade” theatrics that govern the whole thing. For example, the telcos have experienced somewhat of a defensive year on their pet regulatory issue, which is the elimination or radical streamlining (or federalizing) of the obligation to obtain a franchise agreement from local authorities, all 23, 28, 30 or more thousand of them, before providing video service to customers, just like the cable companies were required to do.
(At the beginning of the year, it looked like the telcos would have cable (the dominant video AND broadband provider in this country) on the defensive instead.)
Naturally, the telcos, which have beaten the “regulatory parity” drum for quite some time, conclude this whole local processing gambit would slow down their deployment, and so their parity drums go silent. Fact is they’re probably right in thinking the approval process would slow things down. One estimate has the process taking 40 years (a telco estimate, it would seem), which is about as long as it took the cable industry to cover the large swathes of this country it does today. Forty years certainly blocks out a significant chunk of time, particularly if one has pretty aggressive plans to offer video to half one's subscriber base within three years. (For the record, I am leaving out a great many details behind these various points).
The cable companies, having faced the Bells’ 155 regulatory howitzers on the franchise issue all year, and done so quite well, now find themselves knocked into playing defense about how they provide programming to consumers, wrapped up all nicely with the weirdly explosive potential that indecency issues carry around. Remember Janet Jackson? Another notion out there skulking about is that cable rates have risen dramatically and continue to do so, a fact noted early and often by the telcos along with at least one major financial newspaper, just today. Noting the rate increases prompts its own response, namely, raising questions about how future rate hikes might be constrained by regulators at some level. The potential specter of rate control in turn dovetails nicely with other arguments that the telco sector has been re-monopolized, and goes begging for pricing supervision by someone (or by everyone).
Over the past several years, however, some changes have taken place. The “web revolution” which flopped so flatly in 2000 is finally taking hold, with online stores now contributing significantly to the holiday shopping binge, capable of factoring in fairly impressive numbers in and around the post-Thanksgiving Day kickoff known as “Black Friday” – when retail stores finally start making some money. One may even speculate that the Internet funk would not have been so severe (or would not even taken place) if not for the applications and cool new business models cart being shoved in front of the broadband connections horse. Widespread (but not yet ubiquitous) broadband in this country has created new opportunities and harnessed untapped capabilities everywhere it lands. For example, instead of sending customer help lines overseas, companies now seek to hire help line reps domestically – and truly so – working from their kitchens, armed with broadband connections and software programs to help out customers caught in a jam.
Oh yeah, and somewhere along the way, Google bought the Earth, or one might be tempted to think so, but only if one has a broadband link with which to view the planet.
Here are some other things to think about:
1. Distribution of broadband remains uneven, particularly in rural areas, which face the twin headaches of stemming population outflow and attracting new businesses to their communities. Legislative vehicles for supporting broadband deployment, such as the Universal Service Reform Act of 2005, a discussion draft of which was recently released by Energy and Commerce Committee member Reps. Rick Boucher (R-VA) and Lee Terry (R-NE), seek to tackle this extremely critical issue.
2. Net Neutrality means many things to many people, and prompts an awful lot of discussion about carriers blocking access to the applications, devices, and content on the Internet, which on one level is really all about the pipe builders trying to control the pipes, while at the same time allowing business models that allow the pipe builders to recoup their tremendous, and risky network investments. It’s not for nothing that this tension very much concerns the pipe builders, whether those pipes are built yet or not.
3. Access to content, aimed at content owners that seek to restrict the ability of others (with whom they may not be contractually bound or integrated) to obtain content for competing network service platforms or even applications. In other words, regardless of whether you are a handset builder, applications provider, network builder and content operator, you will have access to the same content that all your other competitors do.
If these various sticking points are worked out, with some semblance of balance, then consumers will benefit. If, on the other hand, balance goes out the window, then we’ll end up with something completely different. It’s everyone’s game to lose, given that the Internet has leveled every single business model it has run into, and there is nothing about the way Hollywood makes money (under some duress, with theater proceeds way off and the DVD business looking long in the tooth), nor the music industry (on life support), nor advertising (from Main Street classifieds to high style Madison Avenue) that will inoculate these business models from the seismic changes that will inevitably, perhaps rapidly, come about.
