The Wall Street Journal Online today published a piece about the Internet Corporation on Assigned Names and Numbers accept requests for new web domains. It seems that if I want to have a web domain ending as .altondrew or .centrism, I could apply for it, along with sending a $185,000 fee with each request.

I don’t see the benefit consumers of digital information will glean from expanding an Internet domain name or address. Branding, especially on the Internet, requires feeding the short attention span. If you want to increase broadband adoption, scaring consumers away with long domain names won’t cut it.

Jamilah King posted an in-depth article addressing how carriers such as AT&T and Verizon have created cyber-ghettos via their wireless service offerings. Unfortunately this admittedly in-depth article is a poorly veiled attempt to argue for net neutrality; a concept that has never considered how best to promote broadband adoption in minority communities much less increase economic activity. Net neutrality will only drive up the cost minorities pay for access to the Internet as higher compliance costs are passed through in the prices for mobile devices and wireless broadband access.

The article started off well, giving an ample description of the downside of access to the Internet via mobile versus fixed
wire connections. I was hoping that the article would focus on how the disproportionate reliance on handheld wireless
devices hinders our ability to produce content and create other ideas that could be sold for income, especially in a challenging economy such as ours. All I got was more whining about AT&T’s alleged bogey-man status.

It raises the question, however. Is the digital divide being compounded by the marketing of wireless devices toward blacks and Latinos thus giving the market the false sense that minorities are only interested in entertainment?

One of my favorite telecommunications industry analyst, Scott Cleland, hits it out the park with his piece on net neutrality. On the eve of the U.S. Senate debate on whether the Federal Communications Commission’s rules on net neutrality should be repealed, Mr. Cleland lays out a clear, cogent argument for why these rules are a farce and should be repealed. Click here for the article.

I would add that while the FCC will argue from now until hell freezes over that they are not regulating the Internet, from a consumer perspective, the Internet is broadband access, and as far as the consumer is concerned, when you start talking about transparency of carrier operations surrounding broadband, that is the Internet. The consumer does not distinguish between the two.

The courts made it clear in Comcast v. FCC not to come back with this back door way of trying to extend jurisdiction thus regulation over broadband. The Congress views broadband access as the Internet and has made clear its intent not to have broadband access treated like a telecommunications service.

All the FCC’s net neutrality rules have done is potentially slow down investment in the deployment of broadband facilities. All the FCC’s net neutrality rules have done is threaten broadband deployment to unserved urban, insular, and rural communities by making carriers think twice about facing unnecessary and onerous costs of compliance with rules invented to address a problem that doesn’t exist.

How these rules aided in promoting our economy is beyond me. How these rules aided in ensuring that minorities get access to a necessary resource in the knowledge economy is beyond me. It’s like the Occupy Wall Street types took over the FCC for a brief moment, and now the U.S. Senate is in a position to evict their butts out of the park.

A new initiative launched by the Center for Media Justice called Black Voices for Internet Freedom, was launched yesterday for the purpose of putting real, outside-the-Beltway faces on the issue on Internet openness.

In general, any attempt to get more people online, especially people of color, is positive. I’m preaching to the choir when I say that the Internet provides a quick and efficient method to access and exchange information.

It is probably no coincidence that this initiative launched on the day that final net neutrality rules were posted in the Federal Register.

While the Center claims that this initiative is an outgrowth of a schism between traditional civil rights groups and Netroots activists, it sounds more like a clarion call to the troops in preparation both for legal challenges to net neutrality rules and efforts to leverage these rules as part of an overall strategy of intrusiveness.

Broadband access providers and their investors should expect this initiative to leave no rock unturned every time a consumer’s upload speed decreases by one or two bytes.

On 6 August 1991, the world wide web became accessible to the public. Ironically, just like that date meant little to most people twenty years ago, it ironically means little to most of the billions of Earthlings who post and exchange information with people around the globe who they may not have met yet.

The expected question is, “I wonder what’s next?“ I think what is happening right now is just as exciting as considering the possibilities. My personality quirk, however, finds me thinking less about a future point in time that continually shifts in the time-space continuum based on what we do right here, right now.

So, to celebrate 6 August 1991 while anticipating the possibilities of 6 August 2031, policymakers should be focusing on making optimal use of our resources such as spectrum and public-rights-of-way and providing the best incentives to broadband investors that would help maximize their returns on broadband deployment.

The best guidepost for policy decisions is the determination by broadband investors and industry participants as to where the next markets are, while clearing the regulatory barriers that might make accessing these markets less profitable.