The Commerce Department today issued its long-awaited final rules on the new federal subsidy program for digital converter boxes. As expected, the program was expanded include households that have cable TV subscriptions, but want to keep using those non-cable TV’s in the basement or kitchen. In a nod to fiscal responsibility, however, the expansion came with one caveat: these “basement TVs” would be eligible only until the first batch of program funding ($990 million) runs out. The second batch (up to $500 million more has conveniently already been provided for by Congress) would be reserved for households that don’t have cable service.
In other words, the cash till will be wide open until the first billion or so is spent. Only when the money starts running low will sensible limits be applied.
Why the two-part process? After all, Commerce’s initial call was the right one: if subsidies go to anybody, they should go only to those who actually would lose TV service in 2009, when the analog lights go out. In addition to being good policy, excluding cable households made fiscal sense too: no one knows how many cable households would apply for benefits, and total spending could easily go over the total authorized by Congress.
Yet, however sensible Commerce’s initial decision, Capitol Hill didn’t like it. Fearing a public backlash when analog signals are discontinued, members of Congress pushed the agency to expand eligibility. Thus the compromise: spending will only be constrained once the money starts to run out.
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I promise to talk about something different soon, but for now let me plug my op-ed in The Wall Street Journal today about first responder communications. You can read it here (no subscription required). The gist:
Offer Cyren Call, Frontline and others the opportunity to bid on spectrum already restricted to public safety use. That would allow firms to build national interoperable networks without affecting how much spectrum will be available for commercial use. At the very least, if spectrum now slated for commercial auction must be used, the government should identify an equal amount of existing public safety spectrum that can be auctioned commercially once the new public safety networks are built.
Whatever path we take, we should ensure that at least two competing networks are built. This works well for wireless services such as cell phones; subscribers to one service have no trouble speaking to subscribers on another while prices are kept low.
A private-sector national network for public safety first responders is not an untested idea. In the U.K., the national network that supports police, fire and over a hundred other public safety services is owned and operated by O2, a private firm. We can do even better, using competition to spur the innovations that monopoly rarely provides.
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 Jerry Brito, Tim Lee, Adam Thierer, and Braden Cox. Topics include,
- Top Wikipedia editor “Essjay” is revealed as a fraud
- States are pushing age verification mandates for social networking sitesl
- Do first responders really need more spectrum?
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WASHINGTON, March 7, 2007 – The country’s two satellite television companies have joined forces with four major technology companies and a wireless company to promote the auction of frequencies currently used by television broadcasters.
In a March 5 meeting at the Federal Communications Commission with FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, the tech companies – Google, Intel, Skype and Yahoo! – joined with Access Spectrum to promote their “Coalition for 4G in America.”
The engagement of Internet giants like Google and Yahoo!, which traditionally have not lobbied the FCC, suggests considerable interest by the technology industry in the upcoming auction, which is set to begin no later than January 28, 2008. In 2006, Congress fixed February 19, 2009, as the end-date for analog television, freeing a wide swath of radio-frequencies for use by new technologies.
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I got my hands on the new public safety communications bill that John McCain introduced last Thursday, but which is not yet available on the web. Unlike what has been reported here and elsewhere, McCain’s bill isn’t a straight-up implementation of the Cyren Call plan. With some trepidation, I say there’s actually quite a bit to like.
McCain’s bill does take 30 MHz now slated for commercial auction and designate it for public safety, which in my book is a bad idea because public safety already has plenty of spectrum, and consumers would forgo the benefits of new commercially available spectrum. But here’s what he does: he sets up a “working group” of first responder and government representatives who will write a report to the FCC outlining what an ideal public-private interoperable network on the 30 MHz would look like. The FCC is then authorized to auction the 30 MHz as long as all the bidders agree to use the spectrum to provide a network that matches the report’s specifications. In some ways this is a lot like the Frontline Wireless proposal. If there is no bidder, however, then the Cyren Call plan kicks in and a Public Safety Broadband Trust Corporation, established by the bill, can buy the spectrum using FCC loan guarantees.
So what’s to like? Well, what there is to like is in the first part of the bill assuming the Cyren Call contingency doesn’t kick in.
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Well, it’s been more than 48 hours since my last post blasting the Wu-Skype “wireless Net neutrality” proposal, so I’ve been itching to write another essay about my favorite subject du jour! Luckily, when I arrived home today, I found my monthly copy of PC World magazine in the mail–yes, I am a geek–and randomly opened to an article by Cyrus Farivar entitled “Six Things You Never Knew Your Cell Phone Could Do” He begins the essay by noting that:
Right before your eyes, your cell phone has morphed into a portable computer. Whether you’re searching Google via text messages, using Short Message Service (SMS) to make international calls, or e-mailing a voice message, these tips will help jump-start your cell phone’s inner PC–and make your life easier to boot.
… and then Farivar goes on to highlight many “useful tips and tricks that you can teach even an old cell phone to do.” As I read through the article, all I kept thinking to myself is: “But according to Tim Wu and Skype, this stuff isn’t supposed to be possible!”
The Pacific Research Institute just published a paper I coauthored on Municipal networks. The study, titled “Wi-Fi Waste: The Disaster of Municipal Communications Networks” reviewed 52 city-run telecom networks that compete in the cable, broadband, and telephone markets. The amount of deception and anti-competitive activity that we found in our sample was appalling and a solid reason why proposed new Muni WiFi systems should be opposed.
Yesterday I filed a public interest comment (PDF) in the FCC’s proceeding to create a national public safety broadband network in the 700 MHz band. Not coincidentally, so did Frontline Wireless, a new company started by former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt and former NTIA Administrator Janice Obuchowski among others. In their filing they propose a new plan to build a national wireless broadband network to be shared by public safety and consumers. This plan comes closer to the commercial provision of public safety communications that I’ve been suggesting, but it’s still a bit off. Below I’ll talk about the plan, but first some background.
As I’ve explained before, the digital TV transition frees up 84 MHz of spectrum. Congress has allocated 24 to public safety and 60 for auction. Morgan O’Brien’s Cyren Call asked the FCC to allocate additional spectrum to public safety for a national network by removing a 30 MHz block of spectrum from auction. The FCC denied the petition saying, quite rightly, that they didn’t have the authority not to auction off the spectrum Congress told them they had to. Cyren Call has since found a sponsor in John McCain who has said he will introduce a bill that would remove the 30 MHz from auction and give it to a “public safety broadband trust.”
The FCC’s current proceeding centers on what to do with the 24 MHz of spectrum that Congress did allocate to public safety. Specifically, the FCC asked for comment on its plan to take 12 MHz of this spectrum and license it to a nonprofit representing the public safety community that would in turn build a national broadband network, charge first responders a fee for service, and lease excess capacity on the network to commercial customers.
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Carlo of TechDirt has posted a detailed deconstruction of the Wu “Wireless Net Neutrality” paper and Skype “Carterfone for Wireless” petition that we have spent so much time writing about here. I highly recommend you read the entire thing because Carlo is covering some new ground that we haven’t hit here yet. Specifically, Carlo picks up on a theme that I was planning on discussing in a follow-up post this week, namely, the myth that the wireless sector is dominated by walled gardens that restrict content flows, and which will only disappear with regulation. Carlo destroys this argument:
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People seem to be not very good at tooting their own horns around here, so I just wanted to note that Adam was prominently quoted in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal editorial $ on the XM-Sirius issue:
Beltway critics of the deal see a media monopolist around every corner, scheming to limit the public’s access to content. And it’s true that the merger would create a lone satellite radio company. But a pure monopoly is one that exists in a market where there are no close substitutes. By contrast, a combined Sirius-XM would have to compete not only with free broadcast radio but also with MP3 players, online radio and even music channels offered by cable providers.
Heaven only knows what the cellular companies will bring to the party. They’re already gearing up to provide more video options, but there’s nothing stopping Verizon or Cingular from coming up with a device that includes a couple of dozen radio stations to compete with satellite.
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