I am currently reading George Gilder's new book:
Telecosm: How Infinite Bandwidth Will Revolutionize the World
Great book, highly recommend it. Gilder is one of the most highly regarded futurists. He is wildly popular.
His newsletter boasts 65,000 subscribers who pay $300 per year to find out what Gilder thinks on future technology plays and paradigms.
Here are a few excerpts on his take on John Malone's superior vision and the future of communication:
Page 172
"In a regime of bandwidth scarcity, the idea of combining conduit and content is valid. The owner of the conduit not only can, but must control access to it - which means he also shapes the content. It doesn't matter whether the conduit company is headed by a scheming monopolist or run by a management team of Ralph Nader and Tipper Gore. Bandwidth scarcity will require the managers of the network to determine and monopolize the video programming on it.
In a broadband world, however, the most open networks will flourish and proprietary networks will wither. Content providers will naturally want to put their programming on everyone's conduits, and conduit owners will want to carry everyone's content. In the world of a broadband internet, Paramount will not want to restrict it's films to AT&T/TCI's network any more than AT&T/TCI will want to exclude films from other sources.
Malone's understanding of this fact - that his own model would soon expire in an environment of bandwidth abundance - at least partly motivated both his effort to merge with Bell Atlantic and his ultimate sale to AT&T. The law of the telecosm inexorably dictates mergers not between content and conduit, but between conduit and conduit. In particular, it mandates merging the huge fiber resources of the telephone companies - which are nine times as extensive as those of the cable industry - with cable's broadband links to fifty-seven million homes.
Obstructing such mergers in the name of competition, or antitrust enforcement, or regulatory caprice, is wantonly destructive to the future of the broadband economy. Only if federal policy continues to stop the interconnection of conduits can the Malone model gain a new lease on life."
"...Government officials frequently demand a "level playing field" for what they call "competition." In this competitive model, there are always so many government protected "competitors" no one can win or make any money. What the politicians call a level playing field is deadly to capitalist competition. The level playing field goal prohibits technological rivalry, which necessarily is based on innovations and advantages that confer a temporary monopoly on their creators." |
