How Bush is empowering the Muni Wifi IPcom Revolution

It is a great and delicious irony that the tax cuts Bush rammed through in his first term, for the benefit his wealthy benefactors and corporate sponsors, are one of the key driving forces behind the municipal wireless IPcom movement that is about to gore the protected oxen of the telecom incumbents. The unintended consequences will be revolutionary in ways none of us can yet imagine. How so, you ask?

Consider that the tax cuts for the top 5% of the population and the mega corporations, combined with other budget recklessness, have slashed the flow of federal dollars to the states and then from the states to their respective cities and towns. As a result, the budgets of a great many cities and towns, with their increasing expenses and falling revenues, are in dire straights. And they are finding it almost impossible to raise real estate taxes to bridge the gap. So what do do to escape from this trap between a rock and a hard place?

Now consider the Chambers of Commerce that are very unhappy at they way the telecom giants have been exploiting them while taking them for granted.

Both groups are eager for a real choice that will improve services they can benefit from and at the same time cut the costs of their communications budgets. Both groups are discovering the many advantages offered by modern IPcom when compared to last century's Telecom. Both groups are also discovering that their peers in other countries have wider and more attractive choices than we have here at home. And both groups are discovering that they can, in fact, implement an IPcom strategy quite easily on their own. They are also discovering that cost savings from moving from Telecom to IPcom can pay for a muni wireless project in a few short years.

Today, the choice between old Telecom and new IPcom is clear and real. And we the people, when given the democratic power to choose what is best for us as we see it, are overwhelmingly chosing IPcom -- as the Muni Wireless explosion clearly demonstrates. The peoples' choice, no longer controlled by the Telecom incumbents, terrifies them. Why? Because if we the people chose IPcom, all of the business models locked to the old Telecom model fail. Can the old Telecom buggy whip makers transform themselves into modern IPcom services and content providers?

What is also happening is that we are seeing, across many domains, the adoption of the first mile out from the home model replacing the old last mile in from the center. IPcom sees the home as being the point of origin and the locus of choice, and thus power radiating out from the home. The old Telecom model, with the control of choice resident in the center to maximize profits on products delivered to the target home at the end of the last mile, is failing.

To see this, consider a home owner who buys a big, flat screen, hi-def TV home theater system for several thousand dollars. The choice is now in the home as to when, where, and how to view "product", that may even be free, produced by anyone, anywhere, on any topic with out restrictions imposed by governments or corporations on content or language. The choice is now in the home as to how best to optimize the return on the investment in home media systems, both for production and for viewing. The choice can no longer be dictated and controlled by the old industrial era producer in the center. That business model is as good as dead.

So we see Sony try to secretly control choice with rootkits clandestinely installed on privately owned personal computers by music CDs. We see the MPAA and RIAA fight tooth and nail to use anti-democratic and anti-innovation contortions of copyright principles to protect the power and profit they once had from the control of choice. We see the movie theater business fading away as they no longer control viewing choices. We see broadcast TV scrambling to survive in the face of the power of choice slipping from their hands. We see the Main Stream Media, with readership declining, very substantially challenged for "authority and reputation" by the new choices offered by text, audio and video "blogs" created at the edges. We see the wheels coming off the Bush political machine and agenda as it becomes ever more apparent that they have lost control of choice and the ability to impose their "story" on the American people, who are now clearly choosing alternative stories.

We are learning that, in the Bush political world of the stern, dogmatic and all knowing father who always knows best, and must not be questioned, the "children" grow up to realize that their worlds are not the same as "father's" and that he actually does not know best about their worlds. The next step is the recognition that Father probably did not even know best about his own world -- in fact, we soon learn that, with our imperfect knowledge, nobody can know best. The humbling realization is that all we can do is do the best we can to know "good enough" to muddle through life's many vagaries, ambiguities, and surprising unknowns. This is why it makes more sense to start at the edge and work our way out in cooperation with our neighbors, our community, each of us dealing as best we can with our local realities. If you can not "know best", then, in the end, any attempt at controlling choice from the center is bound to fail.

As a result of all of this, we are now living through the political, economic, and cultural tumult of the necessary relocation, if we want to preserve our democracy, of the control of the power of choice from its old point of origin in the center of the Telecom world view to its new point of origin: The edge of the network nobody owns and the new IPcom distributed world view.

Posted by Jock Gill at November 26, 2005 5:55 PM | TrackBack