August 2016

In the hit Broadway musical Hamilton Eliza Schuyler sings, “Look around, look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now.” Eliza, of course, is talking about the American Revolution. We can feel the same way about the revolution we are living through. Our revolution is a network revolution.

Driven by ever-evolving technology, the networks that connect us are changing…and the patterns of commerce and culture that depend on those connections are changing as a result. This is a time of incredible opportunity and reshaping. It is a time of testing. To be a part of it is a privilege. Charlie Firestone has asked me to forecast what lies ahead for this revolution and the FCC. Today, we stand in the shadow of those Americans who lived through their own network revolution. Just as they were, we are challenged to make sense of the new network realities. That is our test at the FCC. For the past almost eight years, the FCC has sought to confront network change head-on; to harness the network revolution to encourage economic growth, while standing with those who use the network as consumers and innovators. In that regard, the history of the network experience that preceded us is not some curiosity, it is a compass. I think of the lessons of the past as a “back azimuth,” a concept familiar to navigators in which a landmark in the rear is used to inform the path forward. In the communications technology space, our back azimuth is what I call the Network Compact: the responsibilities of those who build and operate networks. There are five components of the Network Compact: access, interconnection, consumer protection, public safety, and national security.

With global Internet traffic growing by an estimated 22% per year, the demand for bandwidth is fast outstripping providers' best efforts to supply it. Although huge progress has been made since the 1990s, when early web users had to use dial-up modems and endure 'the world wide wait', the Internet is still a global patchwork built on top of a century-old telephone system. The copper lines that originally formed the system's core have been replaced by fibre-optic cables carrying trillions of bits per second between massive data centres. But service levels are much lower on local links, and at the user end it can seem like the electronic equivalent of driving on dirt roads. The resulting digital traffic jams threaten to throttle the information-technology revolution. Consumers can already feel those constraints when mobile-phone calls become garbled at busy times, data connections slow to a crawl in crowded convention centres and video streams stall during peak viewing hours. Internet companies are painfully aware that today's network is far from ready for the much-promised future of mobile high-definition video, autonomous vehicles, remote surgery, telepresence and interactive 3D virtual-reality gaming.

That is why they are spending billions of dollars to clear the traffic jams and rebuild the Internet on the fly—an effort that is widely considered to be as crucial for the digital revolution as the expansion of computer power. Laying new high-speed cable is just one improvement. Researchers and engineers are also trying several other fixes, from speeding up mobile networks to turbo-charging the servers that relay data around the world.

You touch your phone an average of 2,617 times per day — more, if you’re a heavy user. That’s 18,000 times a week. Nearly one million times a year. Enough that all those swipes, taps, drags, flicks and pinches feel both hard-wired and totally natural. Of course, our interactions with our touch screens are neither of those things: They’re deliberately strategized, user-tested and designed toward specific purposes, by people with self-serving goals. And Ben Grosser, an artist whose work interrogates power and technology, thinks we ought to pay more attention to both. Grosser released the first in a series of three videos that will examine how we interact with our touch screens and how those interactions are represented in modern television and movies.