Policy for access: Framing the question

Five years after the ‘96 Telecommunications Act, we still find precious little local facilities-based competition. The infrastructure for local broadband access is also substantially behind expectations. In response there are calls in Congress and even from the FCC for new legislation to “free the Bells.” However, the same ideology drove policy, not just five years ago, but also almost twenty years back with the first modern push for “freedom,” namely divestiture. How might we frame the question of policy for local access to engender a more fruitful approach? The starting point for this analysis is the network—not bits and bytes, but the human network. With the human network as starting point, the unit of analysis is the community—specifically, the individual in a tension with community. There are two core ideas. The first takes a behavioral approach to the economics. The insight here is that each of us seems to come innately equipped with effortless temporal alternation between two key opposites, competition and consensus. Then competition as a key component of policy can be joined by what amounts to its opposite, but in a temporal succession. For this novel policy frame the marketplace operates in a tension with community hierarchy—the relative share between beneficial chaos and order, in economic affairs, becomes explicit. If the first main idea provides a conceptual base for open source, the second core idea distinguishes open source from open design—the focus turns, that is, to the information ‘frontier’ we push forward. While the first policy innovation mandates organizational behavior, the second notes that the end product of such a policy cycle is actually a choice between open and integrated design. The trade is between ‘integrated’ design for higher performance now and ‘open’ design for more innovation down the road and so better performance later. The resulting policy frame for access is worked out in the detailed, concrete steps of an extended thought experiment. A small town setting (Concord, Massachusetts) grounds the discussion in the real world. The purpose overall is to stimulate new thinking * Paper available for download at http://www.davidallen.org/papers/Policy for Access.pdf and http://www.davidallen.org/papers/Policy for Access A4.pdf (yes, there are spaces in the URL’s). ** Co-Principal, World Collaboration CPR; Co-Editor, Information Economics and Policy; 316 Heaths Bridge Road, Concord, MA 01742, USA; +1 978 287 0433 / +1 978 287 0434 – fax; [email protected]; www.davidallen.org , www.worldcollaboration.org [preview site available shortly].