One of the more important, more contentious, and more complicated tech policy issues is radio spectrum allocation. It’s an issue I don’t have a lot of background experience in but have been learning a lot about lately. It’s a hot topic right now because the FCC is about to hold incentive auctions to transition some of our airwaves from TV use to broadband internet use.  It also made the front page of the Washington Post last week, which caused a bunch of confusion about what’s going on.  It’s all kind of hard to grok. To get my head wrapped around it, I’m reading through the New America Foundation’s excellent Citizen’s Guide to the Airwaves (published in 2003 but lays out the essential foundation afaict).  New America also has a website dedicated to the issue at SpectrumPolicy.org. What I do know is that it’s important that we leverage our spectrum assets to enable as much innovation as possible.  Not only to improve our baseline internet connectivity (which is really bad), but to allow for lots of new uses of the spectrum that we might not anticipate (as happened with Wifi and Bluetooth in the unlicensed high frequency bands). Update: Harold Feld tells us that we really could have long-distance nationwide wifi.

Yesterday I spent the day at Princeton with Steve Schultze and the rest of the team at the Center for Information Technology Policy. The topic of my talk was “Peer Progress and Regulation 2.0” — something I’ve been thinking and talking about over the past several months, but haven’t yet written a ton about.  That will change soon. In a nutshell: we are seeing an explosion of “peer networks” — networks of people, powered by the web, collaborating and consuming in new ways (think: Etsy, Airbnb, Skillshare, Kickstarter, etc.)  As these network-oriented communities touch more and more real-world sectors (housing, transportation, health, education) they are running into regulatory trouble, as many of them don’t fit into traditional categories (is Airbnb a Hotel? a phone book?  a real estate broker?  Is Skillshare a university?), often operate in legal gray areas, and often disrupt incumbents. I’ve been working with many of these companies, and with folks in academia and in the public sector, to get a better understanding of what this means (for our economies, our neighborhoods, etc) and how we might approach it.  There is tremendous opportunity here — as networks tend to produce solutions that are lower in cost and more scalable than traditional approaches — but there are also new kinds of risk, as the barriers to production and consumption decrease.  All of this presents really interesting public policy questions. Perhaps the most interesting idea that came out of the discussion is the notion scale.  When peer networks are just starting out — often in new sectors — they have relatively little overall impact on the economy or society.  But as they grow, their impact increases exponentially.  The idea of some sort of safe harbor for smaller, earlier networks, that would allow them the freedom to innovate and to explore new opportunities, is an interesting one. Here are my slides from the talk, and here is the video: (unfortunately there were some audio problems right in the beginning, but the rest is fine)

This morning I am heading down to the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy to talk about Peer Progress and Regulation 2.0.  The pitch goes like this:

“Peer Networks” are bringing new organizational and economic dynamics to every sector — unlocking tremendous opportunity and potential. At the same time, they threaten incumbents in the private and public sectors, and present new challenges for regulators working to protect the public interest. Please join us to discuss the dynamics of peer networks, the opportunities they present to our economies and societies, and the political and policy challenges facing their advancement.

So it’s fitting that my morning reading kicked off with this critique of the Peer Progressive worldview (as embodied in Steven Johnson’s recent book, Future Perfect) by Evgeny Morozov.  If you’ve read Future Perfect, or other books about how peer networks & open collaboration are changing our society & economy by folks such as Benkler, ZIttrain, Weinberger, Shirky, etc., go read the article as well as Steven’s rebuttal now. The gist of Morozov’s argument is that Future Perfect is Internet-Centrism / Cyber-utopianism in a box - conveniently omitting many tough questions and cherry-picking historical examples to fit a pre-determined viewpoint.  Johnson’s response is that Morozov’s critique misses many of the nuances of his argument. I don’t have time to write a proper response right now - but my starting point for thinking about this is pretty obvious.  I’m describe myself as a “student of cities and the internet”, this blog is named after one of the ideas in Steven’s previous book, I’ve written about Steven and his ideas many times before, he and I are working on a project together right now, and my interest in all of this stems from reading Jane Jacobs in college.  So I am hardly an impartial observer. That said, I welcome Morozov’s critique, and find it tremendously useful in shaping and sharpening my thinking.