A new FCC order restricts a wireless company’s cooperation with two important mobile service providers and could hinder the FCC’s own goal of extending more wireless coverage to more Americans.

“Architects of the legislation that binds the nation’s communications infrastructure in the year 2010 were born in the 1870s and 1880s. There is talk today in Washington about categorizing technologies and platforms developed in the 21st century under different Titles of legislation written by people born in the 19th century. We don’t need to jettison all the wisdom of the ancients, but perhaps there’s a better way?”
— Nick Shulz, writing at the Enterprise Blog, March 25, 2010

With the release of the FCC’s National Broadband Plan, we continue to hear all sorts of depressing stories about the sorry state of American broadband Internet access. But is it true?
International comparisons in such a fast-moving arena as tech and communications are tough. I don’t pretend it is easy to boil down a hugely complex topic to one right answer, but I did have some critical things to say about a major recent report that got way too many things wrong. A new article by that report’s author singled out France as especially …

See our article today at RealClearMarkets . . .
Entrepreneurial Innovation and the Internet
by Bret Swanson
As Washington and the states pile up mountainous liabilities – $3 trillion for unfunded state pensions, $10 trillion in new federal deficits through 2019, and $38 trillion (or is it $50 trillion?) in unfunded Medicare promises – the U.S. needs once again to call on its chief strategic asset: radical innovation.
One laboratory of growth will continue to be the Internet. The U.S. began the 2000’s with fewer than five million residential broadband lines and zero mobile …

A number of interesting new articles and forums deal with our exaflood theme of the past few years.
“Striving to Map the Shape-Shifting Net” – by John Markoff – The New York Times – March 2, 2010
“Data, data, everywhere” – The Economist – Special Report on Managing Information – February 25, 2010
“Managing the Exaflood” – American Association for the Advancement of Science – February 19, 2010
“Professors Find Ways to Keep Heads Above ‘Exaflood’ of Data” – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education – February 24, 2010

The Internet has two billion global users, and the developing world is just hitting its growth phase. Mobile data traffic is doubling every year, and soon all four billion mobile phones will access the Net. In 2008, according to a new UC-San Diego study, Americans consumed over 3,600 exabytes of information, or an average of 34 gigabytes per person per day. Microsoft researchers argue in a new book, “The Fourth Paradigm,” that an “exaflood” of real-world and experimental data is changing the very nature of science itself. We need completely new strategies, they write, to “capture, curate, and analyze” these unimaginably large waves of information.

Wyoming wireless operator Brett Glass has 20 questions for the FCC on Net Neutrality.

With 16.5% of the nation “underemployed” and economists gloomily doubting next-generation job creation, Washington is considering a number of strategies, including the President’s “jobs bill.” “Jobs,” President Obama insisted in his state of the union address, “must be our number one focus in 2010.”
But as Washington concentrates on employment, it also is considering a possibly job-killing set of new regulations on the communications sector. Known as “Net Neutrality,” these proposed new rules could, in their extreme form, prohibit many technologies and business plans used today on the Internet, not to …

The Wall Street Journal‘s Digits blog asks, “Could Verizon Handle Apple Tablet Traffic?”
The tablet’s little brother, the iPhone, has already shown how an explosion in data usage can overload a network, in this case AT&T’s. And the iPhone is hardly the kind of data guzzler the tablet is widely expected to be. After all, it’s one thing to squint at movies on a 3.5-inch screen and quite another to watch them in relatively cinematic 10 inches.
“Clearly this is an issue that needs to be fixed,” says Broadpoint Amtech analyst Brian …

Just two more New York Times articles that point out what’s obvious around here: the Internet’s dramatic and unpredictable disruption of the whole “media” space. Isn’t Washington’s assumption that it can sort all this out and impose particular business models on the media space through prescriptive Net Neutrality regulation, a case of supreme hubris?
“What if Conan said, ‘Bye, NBC. Hello, Internet.”?
“Xbox Takes on Cable, Streaming TV Shows, and Movies.”