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December 31, 2003

FCC Chairman's Interview in Silicon Valley

On Monday, one news item that I forgot to mention in my blog was an interview that FCC Chairman Powell recently did with the editors and reporters of the San Jose Mercury News.

Two paragraphs from the interview which still stand out in my mind are:

"Now to be a phone company, you don't have to weave tightly the voice service into the infrastructure. You can ride it on top of the infrastructure. So if you're a Vonage, you own no infrastructure. You own no trucks. You roll to no one's house. They turn voice into a application and shoot it across one of these platforms. And, suddenly, you're in your business.

And that's why if you're the music industry, you're scared. And if you're the television studio, movie industry, you're scared. And if you're an incumbent infrastructure carrier, you'd better be scared. Because this application separation is the most important paradigm shift in the history of communications, and will change things forever. . . . I have no problem if a big and venerable company no longer exists tomorrow, as long as that value is transferred somewhere else in the economy."

These are very interesting words to think about as we try to predict the FCC's regulatory approach towards IP Communications in 2004.

Posted by jeff on December 31, 2003 09:38 PM | Permalink

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