Man, I love new technology

Not just any new technology, but paradigm shifting new technology. Upgrades in existing technology are fine and dandy, but technology that will change an industry or how consumers interact really gets me excited. Just thinking about it will cause me to start bouncing up and down in my chair because it's so cool. I've read about these 2 this morning.

Wi-Fi cell phones (though that's the wrong name). Take your Wi-Fi PDA and add VoIP and you get the picture. Alternately, take your cell phone and add a Wi-Fi chip that will route the call over a VoIP Wi-Fi connection when present. This changes the pricing paradigm for phone calls and ownership of the connection to the consumer. The possible implications are amazing, at least until the Baby Bells start buying up all the Wi-Fi providers and again own the connection to the consumer. Of course, this causes me great concern since it was telecom deregulation that spurred all this innovation, but if it's all bought up by the companies that were deregulated, the net result will put us right back where we were. Hey FCC, are you noticing any of this?

Ebay moving in to the sale (or more appropriately, the resale) of digital content, specifically music. Yep, you read it right. Ebay is starting a trial to allow legitimate owners of digital music to sell that music and the associated usage rights to that music via their auction site. This is the next step in the digital content evolution because what good is content I can buy, but then can't sell when I'm done with it. Music on a physical medium like a CD can be sold to CD World, or at a garage sale, or via Ebay, but what can you do today with music you have digital rights to when you no longer need and/or want it. Of course, the technology to assure the seller is an actual rights holder and that he/she doesn't retain a copy of the music once sold has been the hold-up until now, but maybe Ebay and their partners have actually figured this out. I wonder what the RIAA has to say about this since they want to fundamentally change how consumers use and pay for music and this continues the current paradigm that they want to change, but from a consumer perspective I like it. I like it a lot.

It's innovation like this that keeps me employed in the industry I'm in and it's the legal consequences of these technologies that are prompting me to go to law school. Legally, we have no idea how to regulate either of these industries and the people in charge are too old and too far removed from actual users to understand the legal impacts of the decisions they are making (like the DCMA, for example). Yes, that's a broad generalization and yes, there are senior citizens who are avid users of the latest and greatest technologies available today, but if Michael Powell fully understood the implications of allowing the Baby Bells to buy up all the cell phone companies and to then buy up all the Wi-Fi providers, he might object to these mergers a little louder than he has recently. Competing technologies are not as useful to consumers if they are all owned and priced by the same companies. I didn't mean to start bashing the FCC of the Baby Bells when I started writing but once I started it just kind of all flowed together. Anyway, you get the point, right?