Sunday, March 31, 2002

Dept. of Overstate

Eric Alterman goes over the top in lambasting Andrew Sullivan for the latter's over-the-top style, among other things. At least Andrew is using a few more links these days.

They're both terrific writers.

Blogerrata

A number of folks have pointed out that one sponsor of the Anti-Mammal Dinosaur Protection Act, Ted Stevens of Alaska, isn't a Democrat. I sit corrected.

One of those, Patrick Nielsen Hayden of Electrolite, also notes that my email address isn't posted on the blog. In fact it has long been sitting under the link from my name at the bottom of the About Doc page (which needs some serious updating). To make things easier, I just added the address in the text. At the same time I switched it from doc-at-searls.com to [email protected], because the latter is my work email address, which has far better spam filtration than my home address, which gets many dozens every day.

Imagine auctioning the musical note b-flat

Jock Gill helps advance our understanding of the Net as a commons rather than a one-to-many distribution system with Overthrowing the telecom monopoly: The best medicine for democratic development both at home and abroad at Democrats.com. It's adenda is progressive politics, but it comes from a deeper place:

...how do we get emerging national economies to scuttle the top down, centrally-controlled management of spectrum as a scarce resource model that is owned and help them adopt the more powerful ocean metaphor. Is spectrum not actually more like the ocean than a railroad in that it can be used by anyone, in any amount, is owned by no one, and should have the smallest set of operational rules? Why should we impose our archaic telecoms regulatory approaches on emerging nations when our current methods are simply the extension into the 21st century of models that were created to manage primitive early 20th century technologies?

He sources The Spectrum as Commons by IKEDA Nobuo of Japan's RIETI. I think it's a landmark work, and I wrote more about it in Naturalizing the Net over in Skywave.

Thanks to Cam for pointing to Jock's piece.