Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Last week the Senate Commerce Committee passed–with deep bi-partisan support–the Public Safety Spectrum and Wireless Innovation Act. The bill, co-sponsored by Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller and Ranking Member Kay Bailey Hutchison, is a comprehensive effort to resolve several long-standing stalemates and impending crises having to do with one of the most critical 21st century resources: [...]
For Forbes.com this morning, I take a close look at last month’s controversial FCC order requiring facilities-based wireless carriers to negotiate data roaming agreements with other carriers. There are business, technical, and legal reasons why the order stands on unsteady ground, which the article looks at in detail. The order, by encouraging artificial competition in [...]
Following AT&T’s announcement last month of its planned acquisition of T-Mobile USA, pundits and other oddsmakers have settled in for a long tour of duty. Speculation, much of it uninformed, is already clogging the media about the chances the $39 billion deal—larger even than last year’s merger of Comcast and NBC Universal—will be approved. Both [...]
On Forbes this morning, I analyze the legislative and judicial challenges to last year’s FCC Open Internet rules, the so-called net neutrality order. Despite the urgency of Friday’s budget machinations, the House took time out to pass House Joint Resolution 37, which “disapproves” the FCC’s December rulemaking. If passed by the Senate and not vetoed [...]
Here are some quick thoughts on the proposed AT&T – T-Mobile merger, mostly borrowed from my previous writing on the wireless marketplace. First, however, I highly recommend this excellent analysis of the issue by Larry Downes, which cuts through the hysteria we’re already hearing and offers a sober look at the issues at stake here. [...]
What I hoped would be a short blog post to accompany the video from Geoff Manne and my appearances this week on PBS’s “Ideas in Action with Jim Glassman” turned out to be a very long article which I’ve published over at Forbes.com. I apologize to Geoff for taking an innocent comment he made on [...]
I’ve written posts today for both CNET and Forbes on legislation introduced yesterday by Senators Olympia Snowe and John Kerry that would require the FCC and NTIA to complete inventories of existing spectrum allocations. These inventories were mandated by President Obama last June (after Congress failed to pass legislation), but got lost at the FCC [...]
(Follow the links for Part I, Part II, Part III and Part IV.) In this final post on the FCC’s Dev. 23, 2010 Open Internet Report and Order, I’ll look briefly at the problematic legal foundation on which the FCC has built its new regulations on broadband Internet access. That discussion need only be brief [...]
This is Part IV of a five-part commentary on the FCC’s Dec. 23, 2010 “Open Internet” Report and Order. Part I looked at the remarkably weak justification the majority gave for issuing the new rules. Part II explored the likely costs of the rules, particularly the undiscussed costs of enforcement that will be borne by [...]
For CNET, I posted a long piece describing a full day at CES’s Tech Policy Summit largely devoted to spectrum issues. Conference attendees in several packed sessions heard from FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and three of the four other FCC Commissioners (Commissioner Copps was absent due to illness), as well as former Congressman Rick Boucher [...]
May 23, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
