Trusted sources tell me Blair Levin is headed back to the FCC to be the Commissar of the People’s Glorious Five Year Plan for the Production of Bandwidth. He’d be a wonderful choice, of course, because he’s a bright and humorous fellow with no particular delusions about what he knows and what he doesn’t know.
I haven’t been enthusiastic about this National Broadband Plan business myself, but if we’re going to have one, we’re going to have one, and it should be the best one on the planet. And no, that doesn’t mean that the object of the exercise is for America’s broadband users to have big foam number 1 fingers, it means we do something sensible with the people’s tax dollars.
The plan should figure out a meaningful way to measure progress, and it should fund some of the efforts to create the next-generation network that will one day supersede the TCP/IP Internet. We all love TCP/IP, mind you, but it’s a 35-year-old solution to a problem we understand a lot better today than we did in 1974. We’ll get a chance to see just how much vision the New FCC has by their reaction to this proposal.
UPDATE: Press reports are dribbling out about the appointment.
What do you think about GENI?
They seem to be trying as hard as possible to avoid all the real issues.