Mindsets
Yesterday I spoke at PLI's 2006 Communications Law program, an annual event that Jim Goodale has been running for 30 years or more. Many traditional mindsets were on florid display:
Goodale is worried that online advertising is destroying newspapers, and can't believe that keyword-based advertising is legal.
Bob Joffe of Cravath, representing cable companies, says there's been plenty of innovation in the form of additional cable channels. And he's not even pretending that cable companies won't monetize their broadband networks. Of course they will! They own them! (No more of this “it wouldn't be in our best interest to discriminate” stuff.) Joffe was particularly skilled at the “there's no problem, no need to regulate” argument.
Dick Wiley of Wiley Rein, representing most incumbents, but particularly telcos, says that telcos are anxious to get into video and that that will represent online innovation. He's claiming that the AT&T/BellSouth merger is being inappropriately held up by network neutrality proponents.
In response, Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge actively took on Joffe and Wiley — this seems to be an annual sparring match, during which Wiley begins every sentence with “Well, Gigi, as you well know…”
There was a large, well-dressed, and middle-aged crowd in attendance. Many suits and ties; not so many junior lawyers, as far as I could tell. After the panel, we all went out to lunch in a very convivial fashion. I'm glad Goodale invited me, and I had a fine time.
It was an odd morning. These categories (cable, broadcasting, telephony, mainstream news) seem to be drifting farther and farther away from reality. Everything is converging at this point. But yet well-meaning people keep getting together to talk through these regulatory categories in a serious fashion, in ballrooms with pitchers of water and white tablecloths and microphones. No laptops in evidence.
Very odd.
Projects
I have four big projects right now – being a researcher, being an ICANN director, making sure that OneWebDay has a life of its own, and being a violist.
The viola project is the easiest of the four, because it's the thing I've been doing the longest. This hasn't always been true. I remember when I first tried to play all four open strings on the violin (one at a time, up and down). Very very hard — right hand holding tight to the bow, right thumb locked underneath the bottom part of the bow stick (hard to explain without a picture), feeling of pain in my left shoulder and neck. I remember that when I first started the pads of the fingers on my left hand stung with pain; the topmost string was like a razor. No wonder so many kids quit after a year or so.
I didn't know quitting was an option. So I kept going, and now when I don't play my hands don't feel as useful and the pads on the tips of my left fingers start to ache. I switched to the viola when I was a junior in college because I thought I'd get a better job that way. I've never looked back, and the few times I've played the violin since then I've sounded like a trombone player.
I did get a better job eventually, but as a lawyer and not a violist. About six years after I graduated from law school I started practicing every day again, not the three or four hours a day I'd done in college (not the smartest thing to do in college, by the way), but a solid hour. I'm not sorry that I took the route I did. Musicians don't get treated very well in America (except for a lucky few), and lawyers, amazingly, get paid just for thinking, writing, and talking. What's so hard about that? I remember the first day of my first job after I dropped out of music school. I couldn't believe that they would pay me for sitting in an air-conditioned office and keeping track of pieces of paper. It seemed like a game, a lark, a scam.
Now playing seems like a gift, a lucky thing I get to do that I've done all my life.