Marc's Voice

Transition team notes

Kevin Werbach just got a gig to help in the transition of the FCC. The only problem is - I’m not sure we can trust Kevin Werbach.

Nice enough guy, puts on a conference called SuperNova - but on two occasions I remember trying to ask some AT&T exec about why they weren’t turning on their dark fiber - and Kevin lets the guy get off the stage without answering the question.

Twice.

Two years in a row.

So I stopped attending SuperNovas.

So why do we think Kevin will act any different to these Telcos this time around?

Then we have all sorts of old guard, status quo people being appointed - I don’t see nobody representing our interests - yet.  I guess we can still be hopeful.

Here are the ideals we’ll be watching:

- continued control of our future by the Telcos - who pass their capital expenditures onto their subscribers, live under monopolistic rules and then bifurcate the bandwidth - creating their own ’second hi-way’.

- and then there’s the cable industry.  Can you say “throttle bandwidth” really fast 100 times?

- Copyrights and Patents laws - all the things that make the world - wrong.

- Stem cell research - it’ll take years for Barack to root out all the damage the nut-case religious right has done - but it  has to be done.

- Illegal gaming of the system - the Justice dept. doesn’t get to hire and fire based upon beliefs - yet Bush has infested the system with his goons.  Now the question is “how do we get rid of them all?” without breaking the law - the very law they’re sworn to uphold.

- Here in California we’ve voted for liberal medical marijuana laws, yet Bush’s Feds have strong armed us, arrested us and refused to recognize our state laws.

- Modifying scientific research - this is also something Barack’s people have to do - go back and clean up all the lies and mis-information peppered throughout the whole greenhouse, gobal warming debacle.

- And this doesn’t even go close to dealing with WAR and why Barack didn’t triangulate:

- gas prices

- why we invaded Iraq in the first place

- the deals Cheney cut for the energy industry

- and our $10B we’re paying for teh war (or the $500B we already did)

Barack has his job cut out for him - but if he hires all the same people to do the job the Clinton’s did - we’ll end up with the  same. I don’t seem to recall the Clinton administration being that progressive!

UPDATE: Some folks apparently think that Kevin Werback is “a net-neutrality advocate”. Well I’d like to see some evidence of that.  My own experience has been that Kevin is all into providing showcases for Telco execs to TALK about the  future - but when it comes to hard issues, all of a sudden he goes soft.  I wonder why?  Thanks to Dave Winer for pointing out this puff piece.