I know David Isenberg doesn’t need to hear from everyone who can’t make it to F2C in Silver Spring, Maryland on March 5&6, but so many of my friends and acquaintances in the industry, (THE INDUSTRY??? WTF???) will be there that I am respectfully posting an open letter to him here as a note of encouragement to him to keep these important annual meetings alive and encouragement to you to go if you possibly can. There is nothing like an Isenberg meeting. It is not by any means an “un-conference.” Pfeh… un-conferences are held by the lazy and the uninspired. Kaffee klatch stuff. F2C is a place where education and advocacy, an exchange of ideas, and a chance to shape the future merge in congenial company. Again I say, “Go!”

My letter to David…

David, I know you aren’t expecting a personal reply from everybody on the list, but I felt I should send my regrets. I want to be there but I had to make a hard choice regarding how I would spend my time this Spring.

F2C is one of the most important gatherings of leaders and thinkers in our industry… “our industry,” the definition of which has shifted and morphed over the last twenty-five years until one is either forced to put blinders on and focus on a narrow segment, or sit back in the chair, breathe deep, and say “Wow, what a rush!”

So what is “our industry?” Is it the “bit transport industry?” Negroponte was bleak about bit transport back in 1994. He said then,

Surely none of us is going to pay the same for a movie bit (there are about 10 billion of them in a very highly compressed digital movie) as we will for a conversation bit (there are only 100 million of them in a highly data-compressed, two-hour conversation). Consider your mother-in-law’s return home from the hospital and her need for an open line, 24 hours per day, just to monitor a half-dozen bits per hour. Try figuring out that business model! Or what about the 12-year-old kid doing his homework, who should have access to WIRED’s content for nothing while Wall Street analysts should pay a fair price.

It is not difficult to speculate. If management limits a telecommunications company’s long-term strategy to carrying bits, it will not be acting in the shareholders’ interest. Owning the bits or rights to the bits, or adding significant value to the bits, must be a part of the equation for telecommunications success.

And this remains one of the crucial points of our present discussions. We have a two year breathing room to nail down a reasonable and fair approach to network neutrality before the giant wakes up, rips off the chains of its merger commitment and roars for blood and profits. What will we do to protect ourselves? How can we transform the one huge global integrated network into a crystal ball, a perfectly transparent medium that is content agnostic with equality of access, and provides screaming fast bandwidth for
anyone who can use it and for whatever use they want?

F2C and the Isenberg SMART list are helping to pull these matters into focus and will frame answers to better questions than I have sketched above. I’m really sorry I can’t make it this year… I seem to be on an every other year schedule… WTF, F2C(2)… I’ll see you at F2C-2008 for sure, and of course hopefully long before that in other gatherings.

Frank