regulations

Verizon CEO comes out swinging against net neutrality

I gotta say, any trade show that opens the ceremonies with some trash talkin’ has my attention.

After giving up a little hip-hip-hooray for Verizon’s long-awaited 4G network (ready for 60 devices thus far and expected to be in 25-30 markets next year) at the opening keynote of SuperCOMM 2009 on Wednesday in Chicago, CEO Ivan Seidenberg shelved his warm and fuzzy feelings there.

The Federal Communications Commission was on the cusp of releasing its proposed net neutrality regulations — a hard sell for the SuperCOMM crowd, to say the least.  Seidenberg pretty much stopped short of calling the net neutrality proponents (and their sympathizers on the FCC) lefty wingbat commies.

“If this burdensome regime of net regulation is imposed on all parts of the Internet industry, it will inject an extraordinary amount of bureaucratic oversight into the economy’s main growth engine for the future,” he said.

Seidenberg said his main beef with net neutrality proponents was their suggestion “that network providers like Verizon and applications providers like Google, Amazon and others occupy fundamentally different parts of the Internet ecosystem — a binary world of ‘dumb pipes’ on the one hand and ’smart applications’ on the other.”

Verizon Wireless and Google — who has been at the front of Team Net Neutrality — are partnering to release a smartphone that runs on Google’s Android system.

“This is a mistake, pure and simple: an analog idea in a digital universe,” he said. “We can’t create smart economy by dumbing down our critical infrastructure.”

Cyber-security policy locks down lobbyist job security

President Barack Obama promised a bipartisan effort, and in terms of his cyber-security strategy, so far the plan looks remarkably like the 2008 plan recommended by a bipartisan group of computer security experts. The focus is to protect U.S. networks from cyber attack and to increase investment and research on cyber security.

You know that means network regulation to combat cyber crime and increase computer network security, among other things. The new Administration wants to partner with industry to secure personal data stored on government and private systems, with a standard that secures data across industries.

The new Administration’s cyber-security plan hit the Whitehouse.gov website as part of a policy document on homeland security. It’s reassuring to know that the first Blackberry-carrying president believes cyber infrastructure is a strategic asset and may create a national cyber advisor who will report directly to him (hopefully in person, since cyber-impersonation is easier than anyone wants to think, according to security expert Bruce Schneier in his Crypto-Gram newsletter).

What else? The Administration wants to work with industry and academia to develop and deploy a new generation of secure hardware and software, work with the private sector to establish tough standards for cyber security and physical resilience, and a number of additional business and personal security.

Telecom industry lobbyists are no doubt loading their briefcases to make the case for what they want, as well as what they can live with. Stay tuned.