Overall Ms. Fiorina is a very good speaker and others have already commented on the keynote in general. Some of her views on regulation are what got me thinking. In essence, she said regulators should revise their thinking to focus on enablement rather than protection. In other words, regulators need to stop slowing things down. This sounds good, in theory. However, it’s obvious there are grey areas and one person’s “enablement” is another’s “protection”. Examples of this ambiguity were brought out in the question/answer session where Ms. Fiorina defined various kinds of restrictions and control exerted by regulators as “enablement”.
In essense, it seems pretty clear that competition and the existence of choices for consumers solves all the problems all at once. If consumers have choice, problem solved. When there is insufficient choice, regulators should then, and only then, look at the situaton, and possibly intervene to correct the impediments, and only in the most extreme cases. Why does it need to be harder than that? What am I missing? There may be a baseline of safety, but that opens the door for where we are today, where the government constantly takes the role of protecting us from ourselves, and far oversteps the baseline in the name of public safety.
"Enabling new business models" is a classic DRMer code word for "force other people’s computers to be locked down so you can pay for things as many times as possible".
After Fiorina’s big pro-DRM announcement at HP, I’m inclined to be cautious about this.
guytfytudty