Tag Archive for ‘licensing’ at Many Possibilities

In a landmark decision today, the High Court of South Africa ruled that everyone in possession of a Value Added Network Service (VANS) license was entitled to “self-provide”. What this means is that every Internet Service Provider (ISP) in South Africa is entitled to compete with the likes of Telkom, Vodacom, MTN, and Neotel. In one fell swoop, the market has gone from 4 players to conceivably over 600 players.

At the root of this change has been the dispute around how existing VANS licenses should be converted in the context of the “new” Electronic Communications Act of 2005. The Minister of Communications has argued that only some VANS licenses should be converted to full “infrastructure” licenses which would allow companies with VANS licenses to build out their own infrastructure. In essence, this was an attempt by the Minister to perpetuate the “managed liberalisation” process that began almost 14 years ago.

That attempt appears to have backfired on the Department of Communications and their Minister. The Minister could have issued a general invitation for companies to apply for an infrastructure license (i-ECNS license) and considered each application on its own merits. Instead, by attempting to influence the license conversion process which is the purview of the regulator (ICASA), they provoked a court challenge from one of the companies in the conversion process (Altech).

The court decision, handed down this morning, utterly rejected the validity of the Minister’s attempt to influence ICASA’s handling of the conversion process and completed validated the Altech’s contention that VANS should be able to self-provision.

Since, the Act states that all licenses must be converted on terms no less favourable than their existing terms, this means that ICASA is bound to grant infrastructure licenses to all 600 VANS licensees. Great news for telecoms competition in South Africa!

Unfortunately this is just a battle won but not the war. There are many other issues to be addressed. For a start, the fees associated with the telecom infrastructure licenses. Given that only a short time ago Neotel paid R100 million Rand for their license, I can see some drama brewing on what sort of annual fees should be charged to the newly converted licensees. The ideal scenario in my opinion would be to have fees tied to revenue and only have the fees kick in after a certain threshold of revenue had been reached. This would contribute to lowering the bar to market entry.

Another and perhaps more significant issue to be addressed is the allocation of spectrum. There are lots of lessons learned from around the world. Why can’t spectrum be auctioned in South Africa in a transparent and open manner. Lack of transparency must surely be one of the biggest barriers to investment.

However, one battle at a time. You can see the general expressions of joy from the South African community. Arthur Goldstuck’s Oh Frabjous Day is worth reading as is the general outpouring of joy by likes of Dominic Cull and Ant Brooks (and a few hundred others) on the mybroadband.co.za discussion list.

Ellipsis have posted a copy of the judgement. Can’t wait to see how the DoC and the Minister react.

So why isn’t there a commons for ideas? Why isn’t there a trust system, a social contract for sharing ideas in the same way that Open Source creates a safe environment for sharing code? For example, if I came up with a useful workshop facilitation methodology, I would share it. However, if I knew that I was likely to be given credit anytime anyone used it, I would probably share more enthusiastically and maybe even put more effort into polishing the methodology for use by others.

Why can’t we open license ideas in the same way that we license software, photos, or blog entries under a Creative Commons or GPL license? I don’t need to get paid and I am only too happy when people use my ideas (rare as they are) but it would add an extra incentive if I knew I was likely to get credit for thinking them up.

Is it not conceivable to create a social mechanism to achieve this? I titled the blog “Open Patents” but perhaps it would be even better to call it an “Open Concept”. And while the idea is inspired by the Creative Commons license, it might be better to call it a “social contract” in order to avoid the sense that there may be a litigious aspect to the idea. (Thanks to Mark Surman for pointing out the wrong flavour of the word “license” in this context). There could be an informal wikipedia-like resource for registering an Open Concept in a shared, public space but it needn’t even be that formal. A blog post or web page might be sufficient. You could use the Way Back Machine to establish prior art.

Naturally there would be disputes and in the “standing on the shoulders of giants” nature of knowledge there would be a lot of cross-linking of Open Concepts but if the debates were over who gets intellectual credit not who gets paid, then hopefully dispute resolution might be handled in a relatively non-litigious manne

Facilitating Innovation

A perfect candidate for OpenConcept is Allen (Gunner) Gunn’s SpeedGeek facilitation process. A great concept that he and Aspiration have shared widely. That is largely because of the Open Source kind of guy that Gunner is. Others in a similar position might be tempted but worried that they might not get credit if they share. An Open Concept License could tip them over the edge. I think this would encourage people to “release early and release often” their ideas.

Also, if one were to introduce a kind of genealogy of Open Concepts, one might increase the likelihood of tinkering that leads to innovation. If there were a place where you could see Gunner’s SpeedGeek concept but also see how he tinkered with the concept of SpeedDating to get there, you double the opportunities for tinkering innovation. Someone might riff on Gunner’s idea or they might see a different direction to take the original SpeedDating concept. Seeing how innovation evolves leads to more innovation

Which leads me to my next point.

How to represent and store Open Concepts

It may be that the software already exists for managing an ecology of Open Concepts. Genealogy software. Genealogy software could provide the notion of inheritance, siblings, and offspring which would ideally suit a representation of Open Concepts. Of course you would need to adapt the software to have just one or in fact many parents but perhaps modern life has already made genealogy software adapt to these possibilities. You would have to make it wiki-like to facilitate an open and consensus driven approach. You could allow for people to “vouch” for the originality of others ideas and have an Ebay-style rating of authenticity/reliability.

Finally, if this were really successful and well-established, could it not provide a resource of “prior art” that might help to inoculate patent systems against bad patents?

So, is this a dumb idea? Unworkable? Am I missing something? Set me straight somebody.

This blog post represents an OpenConcept, Attribution, Share-alike

Many Possibilities