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To: D. Long who wrote (27050)	1/30/2004 4:28:56 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793958

My oldest son makes his living in this business. Voice Over the Internet: Let It Fly By James K. Glassman Published 01/29/2004 A big reason the Internet has taken off is that government has kept out of the way. Hands-off is always the best policy for a new technology. It lets innovators innovate and investors avoid the extra risks of special taxes and rules. Consider aviation. Last month marked the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers' Kitty Hawk flight -- which created entire industries, lifted the U.S. economy to new heights, changed the world. But imagine if railroad regulators had burdened Wilbur and Orville and their successors with regulations requiring planes to have brake lights, whistles and a caboose and charging them a few cents for every mile of "track" traveled in the air. Aviation would have been set back decades. Today, the Internet is now on the verge of a development likely to spread super-fast, inexpensive broadband connections to the majority of U.S. homes and, among other things, change the way we get health care and educate and entertain our families. Regulators will soon make a crucial choice: whether to apply railroad rules to modern Wright Brothers or free the planes to fly. The catalyst is known familiarly as VoIP. It enables packets of voice signals to travel over the Internet. Voice becomes an Internet application, like e-mail. Michael Powell, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, calls VoIP "the most significant paradigm shift in the entire history of modern communications." VoIP has been around awhile, but, thanks to new investments, it has made a breakthrough. It started, says Wired magazine, "as a geek-out for corporate penny-pinchers. But now making phone calls using Voice over Internet Protocol is resonating with consumers…. [It's] a disruptive technology that's making conventional phone companies nervous." Already, 10 percent of calls use VoIP and "the adoption curve is arching steeply skyward." VoIP improves quality and lowers costs. It can connect your phone to every other device you've plugged into the Internet. Your calls can follow you to any phone number. You can put together your own giant video conference calls. VoIP will lead to monthly flat-rate calling anywhere. For businesses, productivity gains are enormous. Experts see VoIP as the "killer app," the powerful application that will inspire Americans to subscribe to broadband. Today, 20 percent of U.S. homes have broadband -- up from 5 percent when President Bush took office. That's a start, but with VoIP, the figure should grow to 50 percent in a few years. Meanwhile, VoIP is already igniting an explosion in investment that will eventually employ hundreds of thousands of new workers at companies like Lucent, Net2Phone, Intel, Dell, Comcast, Vonage, Qwest, Cisco, SBC, AT&T, Oracle and start-ups we can only guess about. It's a timely cure for a recovering economy. What can stop VoIP dead in its tracks? The same thing that could have stopped the Wright Brothers -- rules and taxes created for another era and a different paradigm. Said a recent news story in the Wall Street Journal, "Because of the Internet's regulation-free status, phone calls sent as tiny electronic packets over the global computer network avoid all of the regulations, taxes and fees of the traditional public phone system." So far, anyway. But companies with an interest in maintaining that traditional system are complaining that VoIP is not really an Internet application. It's more like a long-distance phone call. So it's subject to rules and expensive access fees that will jack up costs to consumers and kill VoIP in the cradle. The FCC's Powell can cut through this nonsense and make a historic decision to keep the Internet free. Last week, he said, "If you're going to say that Voice over IP is something that needs regulation, then you're going to have to explain to me why e-mail isn't also, or streaming video or instant messaging is not also." Such free-market rhetoric is encouraging, but with Powell, you never know. In an act of political hair-splitting, he's hinted he may liberate some VoIP systems and not others. That would be a terrible mistake. Battles over metaphysical questions as "what's a long-distance call?" are Washington's stock in trade. But, in the real world, they're absurd insider disputes that aid rent-seeking firms and deter progress. The question here is simple: Will gloriously disruptive VoIP help consumers and businesses and boost the economy, like the Wright Brothers' revolution? The answer is "Yes!" and the FCC's job is to get off the runway and let VoIP take off. Copyright © 2004 Tech Central Station - www.techcentralstation.com

To: D. Long who wrote (27050)	1/30/2004 4:40:33 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793958

Tech's Immediate Future By Sonia Arrison Tech Central Station The Department of Commerce recently reported that "U.S. IT producers remain the most competitive in the world." This is good news for the moment, but many, particularly in Silicon Valley, are wary about the future. Eavesdrop on conversations at Ming's restaurant in Palo Alto, and you're likely to hear intense discussions concerning the greatest threats to the vitality of the U.S. tech sector over the next 10-20 years. China is one concern. China is a huge emerging market, but many tech companies worry about barriers to access. The Chinese government has indicated it plans to favor purchasing China-made software products over others. Such protectionism would put a damper on U.S. technology growth. It would also hamstring the Chinese, as buying decisions would not be based solely on the best product for the job. Another issue that's got the tech community abuzz is what's known as off-shoring, the practice of out-sourcing jobs to workers in lower-cost foreign markets like India or China. Workers in jobs such as computer programming and customer support are worried about losing their jobs to cheaper labor, and tech execs are anxious because they fear anti-competitive, protectionist measures from politicians looking to score points in an election year. Indeed, the issue has already come up. Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry recently said, "We're going to end the days when our government encourages big business to turn its back on America's workers. We need to end an administration that lets companies like Halliburton ship their old boss to the White House and get special treatment while they ship American jobs overseas." But even if President Bush wins the next election, tech entrepreneurs remember steel tariffs and farm bills that show his administration isn't always true to free-trade principles. Andy Wilson, former Senior Vice President of Overture and Principal at Continuity Partners, says he's both worried about "the interventionist stance of the current administration" and the culture of entitlement that Americans seem increasingly prone to embrace. "There's a sense of entitlement and that breeds hubris," Wilson said, "grunt work is going to places like India and now we have to re-tool ourselves to be efficient creators of intellectual property. The world is a global marketplace." Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina was more blunt. "There is no job that is America's God-given right," Fiorina said. "We have to compete for jobs." That's tough talk from one of America's toughest CEOs, but it's also true. Only in a competitive marketplace will companies be able to innovate and produce the best goods and services that ultimately attract investment and create jobs. When the economy changes, government protectionism only makes that task more difficult. Add to this picture the fact that government is considering both new Internet taxes and saddling voice-over-Internet protocol (VOIP) services with old and outdated telecom rules. The combination of these two domestic policy choices would have a deleterious effect on broadband and the tech sector as a whole. New Internet access taxes would make it more difficult for lower-income people to log on to the web, and VOIP regulations could bring to a halt an innovative and inexpensive way to make phone calls. Meanwhile, everyone is worried about the economy, but the best way to get out of a slump is not more government intervention. America is engaged in a presidential election year when many promises will be made but results will be few. To help the U.S. tech sector succeed, the winner needs to help remove barriers to entrepreneurship. The technology community needs an administration that will fight international barriers to trade, labor's harmful protectionist ideas, and domestic policies that hamstring innovations such as broadband. Only by creating a less-constrained environment will the U.S. continue to create jobs and remain the "most competitive in the world." Copyright © 2004 Tech Central Station - www.techcentralstation.com