Lifelong
I was struck by the description of Einstein's later life that Walter Isaacson's new biography provides. There he is, day after day, year after year, carefully working through ideas that might support a unified field theory of some kind. According to Isaacson, Einstein often got quite excited about one notion or another, and some newspaper would find out - headlines would trumpet something like “Einstein Solves Riddle of Universe” - and then he'd decide that his latest move was just bunk, worthless, and he'd start in again the next day. The next year, still more headlines, but no solution.
Even on his deathbed Einstein was playing with equations, hoping that the screen would be ripped back and he'd see through to the essence of everything.
Although Einstein didn't seem to be anguished by this (at least as Isaacson describes him), there is always the possibility of anguish over the enterprise - what if the lifelong obsession doesn't pay off? Perhaps he got through it by playing the violin.
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As promised yesterday, snippets from 1993-94 about the fabulous new world of “personal communications services” opening up as a result of spectrum auctions. We've ended up with auctions that replicate what happened in the first years of radio - pleasing incumbents - but now we've got a heavily-concentrated marketplace for the key bottleneck of internet access. Shouldn't the advent of the internet have shifted the focus to improving internet access for everyone? The New York Times:
“Using the
digital electronics of computers, the new “personal communications
services” will be capable of sending data, images and perhaps even video
to an expanding family of nomadic computing devices — palm-size computers,
electronic notepads and what some people call mutant devices that combine the
features of a telephone, computer and pager.”
*
“We are about to launch a huge industry in the next week,”
said Scott Schelle, the vice president of American Personal Communications, a
small company that is 70 percent owned by the Washington Post Company and has
built one of the first experimental personal communications services systems in
the United States. “The timing is important because communications,
computers and media are converging just as the wireless revolution is coming of
age.”
*
Almost every communications
company has something to gain or something to fear with the expansion of
wireless and next week's new rules. “This will shake the foundations of
the entire telecommunications industry,” remarked Alfred C. Sikes, who
served as the chairman of the F.C.C. under President George Bush and is now the
president of Hearst New Media and Technology, a unit of the Hearst Corporation.
*
“An auction is bound to be better
than the alternatives” of giving away licenses by lottery or awarding them
to the best lobbyists. (former FCC official).
Why auctions?
I spent some time over the last few days trying to understand how we got in the position of auctioning off airwaves that have been painfully wrested from the broadcasters (who would rather eat their children than give up on spectrum) to the highest bidder.
The plan is that the auction could net about $15 billion. That's about what the US spends each month on the Iraq war. So it's not a lot.
In exchange for this, most pundits are saying the rules floated by Chairman Martin will almost inevitably end up with the current wireless incumbents winning the auction. That's a big loss on a number of vectors - these auctions began in the Clinton era with the grand hope of a brand new telecommunications sector, full of upstarts and new forms of data transmission that would catapault the US into the future. (You should read the speeches! I'll dig some up for you in future posts.)
It's also a big loss for the “public interest” that the auction should, by law, be serving. Congress has said pretty clearly that the auction is supposed to promote economic
opportunity and competition and ensure new and innovative technologies are accessible;
to avoid concentration; and to note the interests of small businesses. None of that will happen if the incumbents win.
The other tradeoff, of course, is the unknown richness of innovation that could be unleashed if we did things differently. Just look at everything that happened with 802.11 — all that — who could have known?
Comparative hearings didn't work, lotteries were a nightmare, and we seem to be lurching towards an auction with deeply political assumptions embedded in the rules. But I'm trying to be optimistic. There's still time for things to change. The Carterfone ideas (no locking of devices to networks, no blocking of applications) are just great, and we're all waiting to see how that comes out in actual language. The public interest can be served in an auction, if the rules are set up the right way.