Tomorrow's DACA workshop represents a landmark for the project, and months of hard work by the working group, especially by Randy May and Jim Speta. The current draft report is not an end, but a beginning of the project and its five reports.
Mustering as much sincerity (and hopefully not too much institutional self-congratulation) as possible, I think it is a serious and important contribution to thinking about communications law reform.
In reaching this landmark, I go back to the inception of the project at the M&S Grill over a year ago. Kyle Dixon - then of the FCC - and I were having lunch, and I was explaining the wonders and glamour of think tank life... [the private jets, the exclusive accommodations, the torrid love affairs with Katie Holmes... oh wait, that's Tom Cruise's life....]
In any event, we were - as policy geeks do - lamenting the inability of the Communications Act to coherently regulate the converging digital platforms, and about the dearth of concrete proposals to fix it. That's when - over a very fine crab cake sandwich - I said "well, let's reform the thing ourselves! Let's get together a bunch of the academics and think tank people and come up with an updated Act." With a polite diffidence where he waits to see whether I am kidding or not, Kyle said something like "OK, sure...." and then trailed off, perhaps thinking this enthusiasm would pass.
As it was, it did not pass, and I went back to the office to tell Randy May that we should lead an effort to reform the communications act. With characteristic Carolinian (North, of course) diffidence, he said "yeah, we should." With that, the Quixotic undertaking was born -- or so I remember it being born.