...how's that for two topics with seemingly (and i suppose actually) little in common?
in terms of the midterm elections, there was (thankfully) not as much dust-settling as i'd expected - bottom line: the democrats are firmly driving the house and marginally in control of the senate. sadly, i'll not be holding my breath waiting for any renewed bi-partisanship. indeed, beyond the early posturing around force reduction in iraq and the not-unexpected rhetoric about "first 100 hours" agenda items (count my vote in favor of hiking the minimum wage), expect the dems to exercise a lot of "oversight" (think "investigation"... better yet, think investigation of halliburton-iraq, for just one example). and, of course, expect the republicans to cry foul and/or gridlock ad nauseum between now and the 2008 election (which, incidentally, has already started). fun.
on the network neutrality front (recall multiple previous posts), the congressional swing may well mean that consumer interests will be better heard (even met?) in ter,s of the ability to access the services and content we actually want. for those asking "what exactly might that mean?", check out my 3/26/06 post. further to that post, for whatever it may be worth, maybe the real solution is for the market to compel access providers to divest themselves of or otherwise separate their "access" businesses from their (existing or planned) services businesses. the former - effectively a utility - then offers non-discriminatory access to the latter, as well as other traditional (including internet-based) or alternative service providers. or not...
(from helsinki. headin' home tomorrow and looking way forward to a couple days off next week. later...)
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