TPW 14: Fairness Doctrine, Wireless Carterfone, and Competition for OLPC

by on May 25, 2007 · 2 comments

Tech Policy Weekly from the Technology Liberation Front is a weekly podcast about technology policy from TLF’s learned band of contributors. The shows’s panelists this week are Tim Lee of the Cato Institute, James Gattuso of the Heritage Foundation, and Joe Weisenthal of Techdirt. Topics include,

  • Dennis Kucinich wants to bring back the fairness doctrine,
  • Tim Wu wants to attach Carterphone-style regulations to the winners next year’s spectrum auction, and
  • Nicholas Negroponte, head of the One Laptop Per Child program, wants to be the only one distributing cheap laptops to third-world children.

There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Subscribe to Tech Policy Weekly from TLF on Odeo.com Subscribe to Tech Policy Weekly from TLF in iTunes Add to Pageflakes Subscribe in Bloglines

SHARE: 2 comments

About Tim Lee

Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.

Read more articles by Tim Lee.

  • Tom Coseven

    Re. Wireless Carterfone. You talked about monopoly as the rationale for the FCC decision in 1968, but this was not historically acurate. Tom Carter brought an antitrust suit and the court refered it to the FCC. The FCC didn’t rule on antitrust, because that wasn’t its authority. The FCC ruled only that the tariff was discriminatory and invaidated the tariff. Although I agree with your conclusion that Carterfone doesn’t apply to cellphones, it is for different reasons. On the subject of implementation of an open access requirement, it could be done quite easily. The GSM and CDMA standards allow for very transparent connectivity at the device level with no affect on your visual voice feature you use as an example. Those kind of widgets sit at a higher layer on the phone. Either the phone has the software or it doesn’t (sort of like a downloaded game).

  • Tom Coseven

    Re. Wireless Carterfone. You talked about monopoly as the rationale for the FCC decision in 1968, but this was not historically acurate. Tom Carter brought an antitrust suit and the court refered it to the FCC. The FCC didn’t rule on antitrust, because that wasn’t its authority. The FCC ruled only that the tariff was discriminatory and invaidated the tariff. Although I agree with your conclusion that Carterfone doesn’t apply to cellphones, it is for different reasons. On the subject of implementation of an open access requirement, it could be done quite easily. The GSM and CDMA standards allow for very transparent connectivity at the device level with no affect on your visual voice feature you use as an example. Those kind of widgets sit at a higher layer on the phone. Either the phone has the software or it doesn’t (sort of like a downloaded game).

Previous post:

Next post: