There’s the problem of international boundaries. Again, the Net has reached across international boundaries and has caused some stresses in some countries like China and others. That leads to the good side. It’s growing; it’s growing very fast. … If you actually look at the numbers on that, it looks like the only thing electronic that’s grown faster than broadband access to the Net was black and white TV. It’s growing faster than color TV penetrated the marketplace.

The problems are some people want to take advantage of that to extract a lot of money, or [they'll try to slow it up because they] live in fear that access [that circumvents] their normal points of access like radio, television, traditional music shops will damage them. It may be unstoppable although a lot of people [are trying] very hard.

Q: Will ubiquitous broadband really help?

A: Ubiquitous broadband will force content to service it. …As you get more people out there with broadband there will be more services available. People want broader broadband, which is the type of thing you want in general.

Q: Given some of the recent directions of the FCC, do you believe that the commission is on the right track in terms of regulating the telecom industry?

A: That’s a loaded question. It depends on whether you believe duopolies will benefit the public. I think I answered it subtly. It’s still too early to really tell where the FCC is going. The cable thing—I wasn’t in love with their ruling. On the other hand, cable is a funny beast. The equivalent in the ILEC area is still a notice of proposal making that can take a long, long time with a lot of input. The way the FCC gathers information is it proposes that it is going to do rule making and see what comes in. It’s really hard to tell what actually happens. Obviously, there are also people suing left and right for their cable ruling. Notice by the way the people that are suing left and right are almost exactly the people who want to do the same on their facilities but don’t want it done to them.

I think the chairman, as far as I can tell—and I know him fairly well—wants to see broadband deployed. The question is do you let the market somehow do it for you? Just how much regulatory kick in the rear end do you give? Does that kick in the rear end get people moving or does it just make them stand still and say we’re not going to do anything until you let go. That’s what has happened in the telephone business side of the house, you kick, you kick, they stand still. You kick, you kick, you kick, they stand still. It’s hard to tell which pays.

Q: Is it important for the industry to treat the network as essentially content neutral or does Hollywood's vision of a Net optimized for one-way content delivery make a better model?

A: I guess I characterize it as do you look at the long term future of the Internet as a population of people sitting on their couches hitting the buy button, or do you see it as a much more dynamic interaction where people take active roles. They run servers, they offer things, they interact with people. If it ends up to be the push button and buy, it’s not going to be a very exciting net.

Q: There certainly seems to be a lot of legislation along those lines.

A: Yes well, there is a huge amount of pressure to make it conform to TV sets and to make it conform to the least changing environment. If you’re running the music business, the last thing you want to do is to have to think what the implications of this thing are to you. It’s much easier to say make it like we’re used to and that way I don’t have to think, I don’t have to think risk.

Q: In one of your CMU lectures you suggest that a security meltdown might be one impetus for regulating the net much more heavily. Do you think there is enough attention being paid to security at this point?

A: No, not really. It’s gearing up now but there’s a huge amount of work that has to be done. As I said in those lectures, we were all friends [in the early days of the Net] and suddenly the population has grown to the point where it resembles the world as a whole, which isn’t all friends. … So yes, we’re seeing not meltdowns yet, but we’re seeing a lot of real, real dangerous things happening. One could see that even without 9/11. You sort of have to assume that you’re going to be at some point attacked by people who are smart. We educated a lot of them…

Q: How do you foresee the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act playing out?

A: That is what could be characterized as the $60 billion versus the $600 million fight. If that got its way you might as throw the Net away. And personal computers, almost everything that stimulated the economy certainly from the non-business perspective, it will become sit at your couch and hit the buy button, and that’s a dangerous game. I think one of the things is that the media people and Hollywood are very, very well accustomed to fighting political battles in Washington. The computer industry really isn’t there yet but something like that bill threatens Intel, Microsoft, Sun, all the people that have to deal with the consumer space. It doesn’t impact the business community very much but it is very hard to sustain the computer economy just on the business world.

Q: A New York Times article mentioned that you wouldn’t have been able to accept your position at the FCC if you hadn’t been allowed to maintain your Interesting People mailing list. What is the importance of the list to you?

A: I’m an educator, right? I’m also becoming a newspaper reporter. I find that people appreciate being fed that type of information and a lot of people when I said I was going to Washington said, God, you’re going stop this and I said no. I don’t know, you could call it public duty. It’s certainly not profitable; I don’t charge anything for it. It consumes a lot of time but I think it fills a vacuum. …Most people get their news in little sound bites. Repetitive sound bites that all say the same thing and what I try to do is when important things happen, I try to give them a set of alternative views and let them make up their minds, which I think at some point is what you have to do in a democracy. It would have been difficult if I couldn’t have continued that just because I saw nobody else particularly wanting to pick it up.