"What competition law has to say about the personalized, vertically integrated ecosystems now being built by Apple, Facebook and Google is far from clear. Consumers will have a choice of competing handsets, as they do now. But their subsequent options (what calendar, what map, what apps) may be sharply limited. Signing up with a particular brand of personal assistant will lead to a cascade of path-dependent filters, as software learns more about its users and serves them more directly."

"What's the basic communications service that all Americans should have? Yesterday, it was a landline phone. Today, it's a fiber connection. But we don't seem to have a plan to get there. AT&T is arguing to state legislators that minimal wireless service—far slower than what's available in urban areas of America, which in turn is far slower than what's routinely available in much of the rest of the developed world—is enough. That's inequality in the making as well as bad policy for the country as a whole."

"Compare this system to an online service such as iTunes, which makes it possible to buy songs instead of albums, and episodes instead of channels. In short, the content has been "unbundled." The broadcasters don't like this, because if all their programming is available online by way of Aereo or iTunes, why would a cable distributor pay billions for it?"

"Purveyors of cyberfear are going in the opposite direction. They are not interested in engaging with other countries to come up with codes of online conduct or to translate the Geneva Conventions for cyberspace — so as to avoid collateral damage and protect hospitals, electrical grids, and so on. They want to be able to change ones to zeros on servers around the globe, whatever that means for speech and commerce at home and worldwide."

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.

In June of 2011, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin met with Hamadoun Touré, Secretary General of the International Telecommunications Union.  According to a transcript of the first minutes of the meeting subsequently published by the Russian government, Putin said: We are thankful to you for the ideas that you have proposed for discussion. One of them is establishing international control over the Internet using the monitoring and supervisory capabilities of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).