I’m at the Supernova conference. Here’s the semi-official conference weblog. For some of the best real-time blogging (as usual), check out Cory Doctorow and David Weinberger.
Former Federal Communications Chairman Reed Hundt just gave a powerful pitch for a national broadband policy.
He wants a $20 per month taxpayer subsidy per household, to last long enough to get fiber optics everywhere, to every home. The details are unclear to me (he says he’ll send me more today), but the overall design is alluring in at least one sense.
Hundt says current policy, encouraging the installation of competing “broadband” lines that are obviously superfluous — one fiber line to every house is enough — is leading us down a foolish path. He would make the installer of the pipe a utility, essentially, and force open access to third-party retail data-service providers.
More later on this…