This month’s trouncing of Democrats by Republicans at the polls has already set off a legislative domino chain that ultimately should result in net neutrality becoming the law of the land. In short, the first thing the GOP did after winning a majority in both houses is send the Keystone XL Pipeline bill through for ratification, prompting President Obama to threaten to veto it unless he got one of his pet projects – net neutrality – approved in exchange. Seldom do such blatant acts of political logrolling generate such a positive result, but in this case Americans can expect to see lower energy prices AND less expensive access to high speed internet content as a result (albeit a few years down the road, as both of these events involve the build out of enormous infrastructure before becoming operational).

Leo Boeckl explains how he views net neutrality impacting his theory of innogration in our In Focus article. Just as we have been comparing all along the parallels between the maturation of information technology at present to the utilities of the previous long macroeconomic wave, it was only a matter of time until the federal regulators felt compelled to step in and protect consumers from oligopolistic price gouging. It appears that time has now arrived, accelerated in part by the desire of “Big Oil” to get more Canadian oil flowing through pipelines to American refineries and export facilities.

Of course, knowing how to profit from this far reaching development is something else altogether, so in our Sector Spotlight article Rob DeFrancesco explains the process he goes through in evaluating what the impact may be. With more people accessing video content via portable devices, demand for content delivery networks should explode – estimated to increase by more than 50% within the next three years. That’s a lot of revenue, and knowing who will end up with the lion’s share of it is immensely valuable.

Unfortunately, all that commerce occurring in cyberspace brings with it a corresponding increase in cyber-attacks, most of them intended to steal your identity, money, and anything else of value that can be extracted via the internet. So in our Next Wave article Rob recommends a company he believes will be one of major beneficiaries from surging demand for internet security.