I'm at Supernova, the tech conference in DC that's run by Kevin Werbach, an old FCC hand who ran PC Forum for Esther Dyson for some years. I'm taking running notes (as usual).
Here's my notes on Clay Shirky's talk on the inevitable (?) failure of the American Internet.
Minitel: Hahahahaha! It's near Jul 4, we need to make fun of the
French.The French govt underwrote the development of a network through
France. When you've lived in no connectivity and ANY connectivity
shows up, it's a great leap forward.However, once the system was up and running, managed centrally,
innovation flattened.The PC started to catch on, but MiniTel was connected.
Then modems, but Minitel could guarantee QoS.
Then the Web: the fusion of the value of the Internet and the
value of the PC, and Minitel was no longer the right answer. And
Minitel had cost them an enormous cycle of innovation. They
overinvested in soemthing that was a good idea for a long time,
and once it became a bad idea, they couldn't see it — the
overcommitment cost them the period of innovation.We've got it worse than the French do: as big a screwup as
Minitel was, ours is worse. We're making our mistake in the
physical layer, in twisted-pair. It's the bizmodels that say, "It
oughta be a good idea to run a circuit-switched, voice-optimized
network" — that was a good idea for a network.
