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What’s Worse Than Rigged Auctions & Internet Censorship? How About Both in One Package!

by on June 6, 2008 · 7 comments

Berin Szoka and I just released a short article on the FCC’s proposed follow-up to the failed 700 mhz D Block auction:  a free, nationwide wireless service that would serve public safety users as well as consumers.  It’s attached down below or the PDF can be found here.

What’s Worse Than Rigged Auctions & Internet Censorship? How About Both in One Package!

a PFF Progress Snapshot Release 4.12 June 2008

by Adam Thierer and Berin Szoka

The big spectrum policy debate in town these days continues to be the fight about how to redo the botched D block auction. As we all know, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin’s previous effort to micro-manage that auction failed miserably. Sadly, the follow-up plan isn’t much better, as the Wall Street Journal notes in an editorial today:

You’d think Chairman Martin would have learned from this experience. It’s not the role of regulators to pick winners and losers to achieve their preferred social outcomes. Private competition and the price mechanism can most fairly and efficiently find the best use for scarce spectrum. The FCC’s clumsy attempt at social engineering resulted in a failed auction that has prevented otherwise desirable spectrum from being put to commercial use. Alas, Mr. Martin has now proposed another wireless auction for a separate piece of spectrum. And this time he wants to require the winner to offer free Internet access that filters out pornography–conditions that obviously would decrease the value of the license and turn off potential bidders. It just so happens that Mr. Martin’s proposed auction seems tailor-made for the business plan put forward by M2Z, another politically connected Silicon Valley start-up looking to enter the wireless broadband telecom market.

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Just sell off the D block?

by on April 15, 2008 · 0 comments

Chairman Martin and his FCC colleagues testified today before the House Energy and Commerce Telecommunications and the Internet Subcommittee on the just-completed 700 MHz spectrum auction. At the top of the agenda was the failed D Block auction. According to Martin, all options are on the table. According to the WSJ, however, some have definite ideas for the block:

Some Republican members on the committee said they believed the 10 megahertz of spectrum should be sold off to the commercial wireless industry, and part of the proceeds then given to public safety so they could solve their communications shortcomings on their own. Those who advocate this solution have argued that public safety entities already control more than enough spectrum allocated to them by Congress over the years, but that it is being used ineffectively.

Those “some republicans” seem to include ranking member Joe Barton.

This is a bad idea. While I’m sympathetic to the argument that “public safety entities already control more than enough spectrum allocated to them by Congress over the years, but that it is being used ineffectively,” throwing more money at the problem isn’t going to fix it, either. Bringing commercial providers into the public safety sphere can help begin to break down the collective action problem that is the cause of the ineffective use of spectrum. If a commercial solution is successful, maybe then Congress can take a second look at all the spectrum public safety now holds and do something akin to the DTV transition: auction the spectrum while moving public safety to better, more efficient technologies.

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