Frank, in my opinion you, Plato and Tainter are zeroing in on the core of the problem - and it extends way past telecomms. It goes past politics, and current global tension between corporate, national and public interests.
Here and elsewhere, we've discussed dying empires, and the dynamics of same. Historically, human constructs start lean, then enter an accretive stage. At middle age, a balance between problems and internally consistent solutions is still achievable.
But at some point, whether it's the Roman empire, a political economy, or US telecomms, the number of problems itself becomes a problem. When any entity - even an organism - permanently enters that phase, it's in irreversible decline.
The dynamic has turned net negative.
Strong leadership can temporarily alter the course of events, but cannot change the dynamic. Decline can take centuries; even after the Roman empire was a thing of the past, Justinian, Constantine - even Islam - temporarily halted decay. It was a temporary reprieve.
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The crux of the matter is internally consistent solutions. From Shirky:
"Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:
“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”"
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Yes: exactly! Not only in this granular case, but in the greater sense, too. What we're seeing here, and globally is proliferation of problems for which there is no internally acceptable solution.
Historically, that's an identifiable symptom of a greater phenomenon.
Jim |
