Paul F. Nunes and I have launched our new joint column at Forbes.com, where we’ll be posting examples from our on-going research on Big Bang Disruption, which we introduced in our March article for Harvard Business Review. The introductory column is up today, at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/bigbangdisruption/2013/05/09/welcome-to-the-world-of-better-and-cheaper/ We’ve also launched a Facebook page and Twitter handle for [...]
Larry Downes is a consultant and speaker on developing business
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Blog
Big Bang Disruption vs. Conventional Wisdom
April 14th, 2013
Last month, Paul F. Nunes and I hosted an audio webinar for Harvard Business Review on “Big Bang Disruption,” our article from the March, 2013 issue of the magazine. An archive of the webinar has now been posted, including the PowerPoint slides. We had a lively discussion with the audience, who posted some terrific questions [...]
Abuse of the CFAA: The Problem of Prosecutorial Indiscretion
April 5th, 2013
With renewed interest in the failings of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the role of prosecutorial discretion in its application in light of the tragic outcome in the Aaron Swartz case, I went back to what I wrote about the law in 2009. Back then, the victim of both the poorly-drafted amendments to [...]
Where to next for the FCC?
March 14th, 2013
Tuesday was a big day for the FCC. The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee held an oversight hearing with all five Commissioners, the same day that reply comments were due on the design of eventual “incentive auctions” for over-the-air broadcast spectrum. And the proposed merger of T-Mobile USA and MetroPCS was approved. All this [...]
Big Bang Launch of “Big Bang Disruption”–and a Note on Regulatory Implications
February 17th, 2013
In the upcoming issue of Harvard Business Review, my colleague Paul Nunes at Accenture’s Institute for High Performance and I are publishing the first of many articles from an on-going research project on what we are calling “Big Bang Disruption.” The project is looking at the emerging ecosystem for innovation based on disruptive technologies, following [...]
Disruptive Tecnologies and the Watchful Waiting Principle
January 17th, 2013
When the smoke cleared and I found myself half caught-up on sleep, the information and sensory overload that was CES 2013 had ended. There was a kind of split-personality to how I approached the event this year. Monday through Wednesday was spent in conference tracks, most of all the excellent Innovation Policy Summit put together [...]
The FCC’s Reign of Terror on Transaction Reviews
December 14th, 2012
by Larry Downes and Geoffrey A. Manne Now that the election is over, the Federal Communications Commission is returning to the important but painfully slow business of updating its spectrum management policies for the 21st century. That includes a process the agency started in September to formalize its dangerously unstructured role in reviewing mergers and [...]
The Latest Leak Makes Even Clearer UN Plans to Take Over Internet Governance
November 18th, 2012
On Friday evening, I posted on CNET a detailed analysis of the most recent proposal to surface from the secretive upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications, WCIT 12. The conference will discuss updates to a 1988 UN treaty administered by the International Telecommunications Union, and throughout the year there have been reports that both governmental [...]
Praise for California passage of law protecting VoIP from local utility regulators
September 30th, 2012
On Friday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed SB 1161, which prohibits the state’s Public Utilities Commission from any new regulation of Voice over Internet Protocol or other IP-based services without the legislature’s authorization. California now joins over twenty states that have enacted similar legislation. The bill, which is only a few pages long, was introduced [...]
What Google Fiber, Gig.U and US Ignite Teach us About the Painful Cost of Legacy Regulation
August 6th, 2012
On Forbes today, I have a long article on the progress being made to build gigabit Internet testbeds in the U.S., particularly by Gig.U. Gig.U is a consortium of research universities and their surrounding communities created a year ago by Blair Levin, an Aspen Institute Fellow and, recently, the principal architect of the FCC’s National [...]