Sidecut Reports

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.

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