I'm enjoying sitting on the sidelines for the moment, enjoying the volleying taking place between aladin and Jim. I can't help pointing out, however an interesting statement aladin made in the uplinked message, because it reverses the commonly-perceived stimulus-response orderings of top-down and bottom-up architectures and economic models associated with telecoms. Aladin stated:
"Historically top-down approaches are invariably beaten by bottom-up market forces."
In the foregoing, aladin equates top-down with Jim's policy-driven direction used to stimulate "broadband" delivery. At the same time he is referring to "bottom up" as free market-driven forces, which historically have been viewed, where telecoms has been concerned, as the quintessential example of what a top-down, authoritarian regime is all about.
In highlighting these juxtopositions it should become obvious that network models, as characterized by both their architectural and economic underpinnings, cannot be neatly packaged, or taxonomized, into binary terms of A and B that remain constants, at least not across different time periods, since they tend to be temporal, only, meaning the significance of each tends to change based on prevailing externalities of the times.
How is it that a pre-1984 RBOC with monopoly status could be viewed as a top-down player, only to suddenly be transformed overnight to a bottom-up contender when the market was opened up to full competition? Was it reasonable to expect that the cultural foundations and business instincts of large monopolies would be modified in any significant way based on a court decree?
"Market driven" models could range the entire gamut, from total chaos to complete order, mimicking both the Internet and the PSTN (using these terms for their literal and metaphorical qualities), respectively, and the same could be stated about government policy-driven frameworks, although the latter more often than not tend to mirror the rigid, centrally controlled models of traditional telecoms.
So, where do freenets and community-inspired (grass-roots) networks fit into these categories? Again, there is no rule, since some align with the top-down model, and others bottom-up model. The question becomes, to which top-down and bottom-up models are we referring? |
