Reboot the FCC by Lawrence Lessig

We’ll stifle the Skypes and YouTubes of the future if we don’t demolish the regulators that oversee our digital pipelines, writes Lawrence Lessig in Newsweek.Economic growth requires innovation. Trouble is, Washington is practically designed to resist it. Built into the DNA of the most important agencies created to protect innovation, is an almost irresistible urge to protect the most powerful instead.The FCC is a perfect example. Born in the 1930s, at a time when the utmost importance was put on stability, the agency has become the focal point for almost every important innovation in technology. It is the presumptive protector of the Internet, and the continued regulator of radio, TV and satellite communications. In the next decades, it could well become the default regulator for every new communications technology, including, and especially, fantastic new ways to use wireless technologies, which today carry television, radio, internet, and cellular phone signals through the air, and which may soon provide high-speed internet access on-the-go, something that Google cofounder Larry Page calls “wifi on steroids.”To read this Newsweek article by Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School and the author of five books, including most recently “Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy”, see www.newsweek.com/id/176809.