Strange Bedfellows
Steve Goodman has been practicing telecommunications law since 1983, when he began working at the Federal Communications Commission. He now represents a wide variety of clients, including telecommunications equipment manufacturers, satellite service providers and international carriers.
With current proposals for the federal government to spend a hundred billion dollars subsidizing broadband deployment, a debate has broken out on whether to allow any of the funding to be spent on municipal broadband systems. To resolve that debate, I suggest looking to physics and economics. Let me start with the physics.
Physics incorporates a wave-particle duality for light. Light acts in some ways like a wave, and in other ways like a particle. In some aspects of telecom regulation, in contrast, there is a binary choice. For example, a service can either be a telecommunications service, or an information service, but it cannot be both.