Glimmers and Signs of Innovative Health in the Commercial Internet

What are the signs of healthy behavior in an innovative industry? This seemingly simple question isn’t so simple to answer in a quickly evolving industry such as the Internet. Commercial behavior resides inside a complex value chain, which is a set of interrelated activities that produces a final product for end users. No single firm controls the value chain, and the quality, price, and user experience arise from the complex interactions between those participants. Moreover, over time many parts of this value chain have undergone innovative improvements, and no reasonable observer expects those improvements to cease tomorrow. There is no agreement about which criteria observers and policy makers should use to assess the performance of the commercial Internet. Ever since the commercial Internet first emerged, there have been arguments about how to best organize its value chain to achieve maximum value for the most users. Disagreements have not diminished with time. If anything, this debate has grown shrill as the number of commercial interests and business commentators have grown. This essay makes a novel contribution to this topic. It identifies patterns of healthy commercial behavior indicative of an innovative industry, and illustrates how to observe signs of such behavior in information technology markets, such as the Internet. Stated broadly, the essay identifies healthy behavior that correlates with desirable marketwide outcomes, such as improvement in products, lower prices, new capabilities, or other innovations that lead to productivity improvements among business users.

Nurturing the Accumulation of Innovations: Lessons from the Internet

The innovations that became the foundation for the Internet originate from two eras that illustrate two distinct models for accumulating innovations over the long haul. The pre-commercial era illustrates the operation of several useful non-market institutional arrangements. It also illustrates a potential drawback to government sponsorship – in this instance, truncation of exploratory activity. The commercial era illustrates a rather different set of lessons. It highlights the extraordinary power of market-oriented and widely distributed investment and adoption, which illustrates the power of market experimentation to foster innovative activity. It also illustrates a few of the conditions necessary to unleash value creation from such accumulated lessons, such as standards development and competition, and nurturing legal and regulatory policies.

Minimizing Vessel Strikes to Endangered Whales: A Crash Course in Conservation Science and Policy

The North Atlantic right whale is one of the most endangered of all large whales: about 350-400 individuals remain. Species recovery is, in part, contingent on reducing vessel-strike mortality. Our science-based conservation program resulted in three efforts specifically designed to minimize the risk of lethal vessel-strikes of endangered baleen whales without compromising vessel navigation and safety. In Atlantic Canada, the Bay of Fundy Traffic Separation Scheme (TSS) was relocated to reduce the risk of lethal vessel strikes by 90% where the original outbound lane of the TSS intersected the Right Whale Conservation Area, and an Area To Be Avoided (ATBA) adopted for Roseway Basin has demonstrated an 82% reduction in the risk of lethal vessel-strikes. In the Gulf of Maine, the Boston TSS through the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary was relocated to reduce the overlap between vessels and endangered baleen whales by ~81% and by ~58% for right whales alone. This rerouting of vessels for whale conservation, as sanctioned by the International Maritime Organization, sets a precedent for national and international marine conservation policy by providing vessels with direct actions they can take to protect endangered whales – both regulated (TSS) and voluntary (ATBA). This demonstrate that despite contentious conditions, effective science-driven policy tools for conservation can be identified, made available, and implemented. The science also provides the quantitative means to measure policy efficacy through monitoring of vessel compliance and, in some cases, can increase compliance through improved real-time communications regarding whale locations in high-risk areas

An Antitrust Analysis of the Case for Wireless Network Neutrality

The ongoing debate about possible implementation of regulatory rules requiring “network neutrality” for wireless telecommunications services is inherently about whether to impose a prohibition on the ability of network operators to control their vertical relationships. Antitrust analysis is well suited to analyze whether a wireless network neutrality rule is socially beneficial. Implementing network neutrality rules would be akin to using a per se antitrust rule regarding vertical relationships instead of the rule of reason analysis typically applied to vertical relationships in antitrust. Per se rules are used to prevent actions that rarely, if ever, have any pro-competitive benefits, such as price-fixing agreements. Rule of reason analysis is used when there are potential efficiency gains from the actions under investigation. Some vertical practices of the wireless carriers, such as bandwidth restrictions, may appear to be anticompetitive, but may also have plausible efficiency justifications so should be judged under rule of reason analysis. Economic examination of the wireless industry shows significant competition between networks which reduces the concern about vertical relationships, but some areas that should be monitored by antitrust and regulatory authorities. We propose several regulatory changes that would likely increase wireless competition and lessen the perceived need for prophlactic network neutrality rules while at the same time allowing efficiency-enhancing vertical relationships.network neutrality, wireless internet, antitrust,

Innovation in the Wireless Ecosystem: A Customer-Centric Framework

The Federal Communications Commission’s Notice of Inquiry in GN 09-157 Fostering Innovation and Investment in the Wireless Communications Market is a significant event at an opportune moment. Wireless communications has already radically changed the way not only Americans but people the world over communicate with each other and access and share information, and there appears no end in sight to this fundamental shift in communication markets. Although the wireless communications phenomenon is global, the US has played and will continue to play a major role in the shaping of this market. At the start of a new US Administration and important changes in the FCC, it is most appropriate that this proceeding be launched.

Nurturing the Accumulation of Innovations: Lessons from the Internet

The innovations that became the foundation for the Internet originate from two eras that illustrate two distinct models for accumulating innovations over the long haul. The pre-commercial era illustrates the operation of several useful non-market institutional arrangements. It also illustrates a potential drawback to government sponsorship – in this instance, truncation of exploratory activity. The commercial era illustrates a rather different set of lessons. It highlights the extraordinary power of market-oriented and widely distributed investment and adoption, which illustrates the power of market experimentation to foster innovative activity. It also illustrates a few of the conditions necessary to unleash value creation from such accumulated lessons, such as standards development and competition, and nurturing legal and regulatory policies.

COVID-19, global health and climate change: Causes and convergences

Despite massive global economic growth and advances in science and medicine with spectacular aggregate and individual improvements in health and life expectancy over the past century, the world has now become severely unstable in multiple domains – biological, sociological, political, ecological, economic, and health care. These pervasive instabilities are organically interactive within a complex world system that has reached crisis status at local, global, and planetary levels. Lying at the heart of this complex crisis are long-neglected disparities in health and well-being within and between countries, the refusal to face how these and climate change have arisen, and how economic considerations have fuelled the trend towards entropy (gradual decline of the planet into disorder). The critical point we have reached, starkly highlighted by the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic pari passu with ongoing climate change and planetary degradation, reminds us of our global interconnectedness with each other and with nature. Comprehending and acknowledging the myriad, humanly constructed forces in each of these domains influencing all aspects of life, are the first steps towards effectively facing challenges to our health, our humanity (collectivity as humans) and our planet. Overcoming denial, acknowledging the magnitude and complexity of these challenges, prescient vision and dedicated action capable of fostering the cooperation for overcoming obstacles are now vital to seeking peaceful pathways towards more equitable and sustainable lives. South Africa is a microcosm of the world, with its local threats and challenges mirroring the global. Significance: Instabilities that pervade the world, highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, are especially significant for South Africa, where they manifest most starkly because of its apartheid legacy, its relative success economically on the African continent, and the implications of ongoing widening disparities and antagonism amongst South Africa’s diverse people. Belief in moving towards narrowing wide disparities through decolonisation and reversion to an ‘idyllic African heritage’ via a transformation that includes widespread corruption, and the ANC government’s perverse erosion of lives today and in the future through ‘state capture’, intensifies rather than ameliorates our predicament in an era when cooperation and a clear vision of current threats and future possibilities are desperately needed. In an accompanying article, potential pathways towards a better future are offered through suggested shifts in paradigms of thought and action

Sidebar : desalination opens a new spigot for water utilities

Water-supply ; Federal Reserve District, 5th

Sidebar : water systems on guard

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