The notion that innovation proceeds through the recombination of existing ideas to form something new is not unique to the Web, or even the last century. In fact, it was Isaac Newton who famously said in a letter dated February 5, 1675, "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants," His modest explanation for how he achieved such incredible insight into natural phenomena has come to represent the idea that all innovations are ultimately cumulative, with each generation of advances resting on the previous.

Today, with open platforms for innovation inviting unprecedented participation in value creation, cumulative innovation is going into ores drive. Growing numbers of professional and amateur developers are crest ing their own content and applications by combining various fragments the find freely scattered across the Web. As described in Chapter 2, this fluids combinatorial approach to innovation is making the Web look inc easing1 like a traditional librarian's nightmare-a noisy library full of chatty compo vents that interact and communicate with one another. "Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything"

While criticising the books lack of walking the talk, it still is the best business book on the changes that are being wrought by the success of small pieces, loosely joined by cheap high-performance communication, on open platforms, supported by cheap high-performance computing.

One of my gurus, Martin Geddes of Telepocalypse is Chief Analyst at, and led me to, Telco 2.0.

By and large they come up with sensible ideas about the future of telecommunications, though they take that difficult position of straddling the disruptive divide between the incumbent past and the faster moving future. The risk of having one foot in the grip of large, slow moving, comfortable monopoly incumbent from the past, and the other in the future agile novel disruptive world of diversity can easily be imagined.

But a recent post to their blog showed their savvy about the trend, and I was happily reading away, as one does when the content is agreeable, until I struck this line, and I acknowlege I may misunderstand and/or put too much weight on a single phrase, but:

The uncertainty of regulatory intervention ultimately works against the carriers, as it drives away risk capital.

Doesn't "uncertainty" = "risk?" or is this some use of either term with which I was not previously familiar?

Isn't uncertainty precisely where risk capital is supposed to be invested?

This of course is one of the many hypocrisies of our brave infrastructure capitalists, risk rewards for gilt-edged security. Champagne on a beer budget.

They bloviate about the risk, while its arguable there is zero risk in frequencies, copper or fibre. They will all return, not at the monopoly rent level that may be their wish, but how much more sunk could a cost be than copper?

Yes, there have been losses on all those infrastructures, but I would argue it was because of over-enthusiatic investment based on monopoly rent returns on stove-piped services that didn't arrive.

Even fibre's cheap, if you're not a Telco ("How we paid the construction guys 18 pints of beer and they gave us a free metro fibre network in Palmy North")

Not sure of the situation in the UK, but our roads, sewers, water pipes, electricity lines, ie all transport infrastructures are funded by the commons, the services over them from a range of suppliers. Telecommunications at the fibre, frequency or copper, is no different.

You can debate the options, but its done when AT&T do it.

Having proprietary service/carriage integration in this day and age is like banks issuing their own currency.