Silicon Flatirons: Welcome Back, Net Neutrality!
BOULDER, Colo. — I apologize beforehand for the expected brevity of this post; since it’s late here in Boulder I really don’t have the time to give justice to the incredible explosion of energy that was Day 1 of this year’s Silicon Flatirons conference here. But stay tuned for more posts this week, because there was a massive amount of intellectual interchange that deserves a wider audience than the folks who crammed the CU Law School auditorium for a full day of discussion on “Imagining the Internet’s Future,” the stated title of the yearly confab hosted by Phil Weiser and the great team here at CU.
And despite the conference’s attempts to cloak the topic in a different title, there was no escaping the idea of net neutrality Sunday. As we said in our net neutrality report from last summer, an Obama victory would probably mean the advent of some form of net neutrality legislation or regulation in 2009. Sunday in Boulder this idea was such a given that most of the discussion was centered around not if, but HOW the new regulatory agenda would or should proceed in 2009, with complete overhauls of the FCC and its goals something under serious consideration.
Perhaps even more important to note at first was the mood of the event, which seemed a little bit like what might have happened after the Jedis blew up the Death Star in the last good Star Wars movie. With the repressive FCC regime of Kevin Martin now thankfully relegated to history, intelligent folks from all sides of the political spectrum seemed genuinely passionate and excited about the prospect of real change for the better, using telecom policy as a way to jump-start entrepreneurs and business in general to help get the country’s economy moving forward again.
It wasn’t a day for the faint of heart — Boulder-based VC Brad Feld was welcomed to the gathering with a not-so-mellow introduction to consumer-rights firebrand Mark Cooper (you’ve got to love any conference that has speakers yelling to the audience, “Mark, that’s utter bullshit!”) — but while we’ll leave the details of such discussions for later, the overarching impression was that there are a lot of folks who are very, very interested in using the opportunity of the Obama election and the economic crisis to effect the kinds of changes necessary to develop and implement the kind of forward-looking telecom public policy that this country needs.
More, more, more, coming later, including recaps of great thoughts and talk from folks like Verizon’s Kathryn Brown, Public Knowledge’s Gigi Sohn, the FTC’s William Kovacic, Google’s Andrew McLaughlin and Princeton University’s Ed Felten (a runmored candidate for the Obama administration CTO spot). But it’s early to bed now, so we are spot-on for the morning keynote from LTE champion Dick Lynch, Verizon CTO. Stay tuned to this channel for more from Boulder…
February 9th, 2009 at 8:38 am
I thought Mark was / is awesome. When I called bullshit on him, I was reacting to his statement “the government created the internet therefore it should be allowed to regulate it” (or something like that). As I mentioned in a question later, I thought Mark was enjoying a good satirical moment.
Of course, everyone that wanted to hear me say that “I’m against net neutrality” did and interpreted my comments that way. It was an interesting example of how important language and words are in a particular context.
I’m glad I got the opportunity to state clearly, later on, that I’m totally supportive of net neutrality, whatever that means!
February 15th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Brad, “net neutrality” means regulating the Internet — in other words, full employment for the lawyers who advocate it.