"The environment for doing business in Dallas is really, really strong," Stephenson told a reporter from the Dallas Morning News this week. "What I like about it is this is a community that not only is it not resentful of business, it likes business. People recognize that profitable companies are companies that hire and help cities grow. And that's not the case around the country."
Stephenson likes Texas, and he likes his new Android-powered Samsung phone (which he showed off in the interview). What he doesn't like is the way that some Washington bureaucrats want to apply rules "written in 1932" to his empire—by which Stephenson means the FCC's current push to regulate Internet service providers under limited "common carrier" rules.
In a bit that was cut from the initial interview (print still exerts its pull) for space reasons but was later published on the Dallas Morning News site, Stephenson makes an interesting claim: his business just moves too fast for government regulation.
"We're obsolescing technology in 7, 8 year curves right now in this part of the industry. And how do you come in and impose regulations on something that is moving that quick, with volumes growing at that kind pace? The business models are still in flux. Whatever regulation you put in, 12 months from now will look silly... This industry is changing so fast it will make [new regulations] look silly five years from now, I believe."
This is a bit rich. For one thing, Stephenson himself references the government-backed principles that have regulated telephone companies for 70 years, despite being drafted in an age before wireless phones, fax machines, and answering machines.
Principles, if constructed at suitable levels of generality, aren't necessarily outmoded by technological developments (though detailed implementation rules do run into this problem). It's hard to see how broad ideas about nondiscrimination, transparency, and allowing access to any legal device would become meaningless when AT&T rolls out faster wireless data connections. In fact, technical developments seem most likely to make the bandwidth challenges posed by things like online video go away rather than the reverse.
Read More @ Ars Technica
