Moreover, it puts the lie to all the silliness circulating among those who want to regulate the telecommunications market even more due to their static vision of the economy, ignoring the enormous capacity for entrepreneurial innovation and creativity. 

 

FON. Martin Varsavsky’s project, consists of encouraging users to share our WiFi excess bandwidth with other “foners.” This way, we can plug in to the Internet through other people’s wireless networks when we are out and about with our laptop. The idea is to have wireless micro-access providers charging for their service and users who have no direct connection but pay for access through FON. The idea uses “the power of the crowd” to allow for cheaper and universal access to the Internet.

 

However, perhaps FON’s importance stems more from the next steps it wants to take. The biggest problem with privatizing and liberalizing the telecommunications sector is the inherited weight of monopoly. Even though there is room for a number of providers in the high capacity networks connecting central servers, the local loop (the line going from the central server to the home) is much more costly and almost impossible to compete in. Based on a static vision of the economy and technology, economists, activists and thinkers of every strip like Roxanne Googin, Lawrence Lessig and Vinto Cerf have presented this fact as an immovable situation that requires more regulation and even, the nationalization of the networks –or a part of them at least.  

 

In an address to the Senate, George Gilder denounced this vision saying it means shifting all innovation along the edges of networks, nationalizing all network development –development that is happening every day. Similar regulations have led US networks to fall behind countries like South Korea in network quality and speed. A mesh of WiFi hot spots with software to automatically find new spots and connect to them is, as Eric S. Raymond indicated, an innovative solution to the local loop problem and, moreover, cheap for business and users, very free market and respectful of property rights.

 

Internet giants like Google, eBay and Skype have grown by innovating around the edges of the telecommunication network. Now they are starting to revolutionize the network itself.