Science & Technology

I am on my way back from the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Cape Town, South Africa. This was a remarkable meeting with an overwhelming intellectual energy. The event was unique in many respects. But foremost, it was anchored by a preliminary meeting of the Grow Africa venture where private enterprises have pledged $3.5 billion in support to African agriculture. This was a serious event that involved heads of state and government from eight African countries. I had the unique opportunity to be part of a small group of people working to connect science and technology with the larger business agenda of WEF.

The Internet, together with the information communications technology (ICT) that underpins it, is a critical national resource for governments, a vital part of national infrastructures and a key driver of economic growth. Over the last 40 years, and particularly since the year 2000, governments and businesses have embraced the Internet, and ICT’s potential to generate income and employment, provide access to businesses and information, enable e-learning and facilitate government activities.

Washington can often be the last thing on an entrepreneur’s mind.  And naturally so – the culture of bureaucracy and reputation for being out of touch is the last thing that someone working on the cutting edge of technology wants to think about.  Developing innovative products, especially ones that are data-driven, often requires an out-of-the-box style of thinking that can seem directly antithetical to the lethargic enforcement mechanisms of the government.  But there are many good reasons for those working on the cutting edge to think about the issues that are "top of mind" for law enforcement and regulators during product development - and in Washington, DC, privacy is undoubtedly one of the key issues of the day.

The Internet is held together as a globally interoperable communications platform through its shared set of technical protocols, message formats, and computer languages, collectively known as "Internet standards." A growing chorus of national governments – including China and Russia – has argued that the organizations and processes that lead to standardization are both outmoded and inequitable. They contend that the current process unfairly favors American firms; that it produces standards with insufficient built-in security; and that it leads to standards that allow for a degree of freedom fundamentally at odds with the social norms of some nonwestern nations.

The rise of emerging markets is heralded as a force that will change the global balance of power. But behind the rise of the new economies lies a strong commitment to leveraging engineering as a foundation for economic transformation. Engineering provides the basic foundations for economic growth such as energy, transportation, irrigation, and telecommunications. Yet the men and women who build and maintain these systems are hardly recognized. The announcement of the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering will go a long way toward helping the international community appreciate the role that engineers have played in making modern civilization possible.

Another Friday filing by the FCC: 146 pages on program access. It’s a classic on-the-one-hand-on-the-other item. This time around it’s even worse for the public, because the underlying competitive reality of the wires that run to American homes is being hidden, in two ways: First, the entire discussion is focused on the market for pay-TV, because that’s the subject of the rules being examined. That’s the wrong market definition from a consumer’s point of view. Consumers are buying both data and video in bundles, and in that bundled marketplace we don’t have competition.

A cyber attack could make it all happen again. Verizon's chief technology officer surveyed a flooded major switching facility in lower Manhattan and put it bluntly: "There is nothing working here. Quite frankly, this is wider than the impacts of 9/11." Damage from Sandy is estimated to reach $20 billion, and interrupted phone service is among the least of it. Flooding in New York's century-old subway system is without parallel. Bridges and roads, homes and businesses have been destroyed. Days after the storm, many businesses remain closed, their employees out of work.

Experts disagree whether an upcoming meeting of the International Telecommunications Union in Dubai will determine the future of global Internet governance.  On Thursday, May 31, 2012, in the Rayburn Office Building of the House of Representatives, a panel comprising some of America’s leading Internet industry and policy experts offered an ominous warning to U.S. lawmakers about future of the Internet. “The open Internet has never been at higher risk than it is now,” testified Vint Cerf, one of the ‘fathers of the Internet’ and Google’s self-described “Chief Internet Evangelist.

It is no surprise to those following consumer or enterprise computing that we are moving inexorably towards the cloud.  The availability of increased – and of increasingly mobile – connectivity to the Internet has allowed for the development, and widespread usage, of cloud-based services.  At the same time, mobile devices have undergone a rapid evolution, expanding both in capability as well as market penetration.  Devices such as the iPhone and iPad have revolutionized the marketplace in less than five years since their release.

Via Dave Burstein comes the news that China is adding 2-3 million people to online connections a month. I’ve heard elsewhere that China plans to have 300 million of its citizens connected to fiber (FTTH, or fiber to the home) by 2015. As one of my colleagues quipped via email, “They must have the special access problem solved.” (Jim Crowe of Level 3 has a good piece re control of backhaul/special access by AT&T and VZ, and the cable cos are also in this business.)  One way the country is doing this is by bringing major antitrust actions against its dominant communications providers.