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 the size of the deal and previous consolidation in the communications industry lead some analysts and advocates to doubt the transaction will or ought to survive the regulatory process.
Though the complex review process could take a year or perhaps even longer, I’m confident that the deal will go through—as it should. To see why, one need only look to previous merger reviews by the Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission, both of which must approve the AT&T deal. Continue reading →
While most folks have been obsessing over their income taxes the past few weeks, Jerry Brito and I have been obsessing about a non-tax: the universal service assessments on our phone bills.
More specifically, the Federal Communications Commission has asked for comments on its plan to gradually turn the current phone subsidy program in high-cost rural areas into a broadband subsidy program in high-cost rural areas. This opens up a big tangled can of worms. Comments are due Monday. We deal with two issues in our comment:
Definition of broadband: Thankfully, the FCC is asking for comments on its proposal to define broadband as 4 Mbps download/1 Mbps upload. This is an important decision with a big effect on the size of the program. The 4 Mbps definition more than doubles the number of households considered “unserved,” because it doesn’t count 3G wireless or slower DSL or slower satellite broadband as broadband. It also raises the cost of the subsidies by requiring more expensive forms of broadband.
The definition fails to fit the factors the 1996 Telecom Act says the FCC is supposed to consider when determining what communications services qualify for universal service subsidies. A download speed of 4 Mbps is not “essential” for online education; most online education providers say any broadband speed or even dialup is satisfactory. Nor is that speed “essential” for public safety; the biggest barrier to public safety broadband deployment is creation of an interoperable public safety network, which has nothing to do with USF subsidies. And the proposed speed is not subscribed to by a “substantial majority” of US households. The most recent FCC statistics indicate that the fastest broadband download speed subscribed to by a “substantial majority” of US households is probably 768 kbps.
Definition of performance measures: Fifteen years after passage of the legislation that authorized the high cost universal service subsidies, the FCC has proposed to measure the program’s outcomes. Actually, the FCC wants to measure intermediate outcomes like deployment, subscribership, and urban-rural rate comparability — not ultimate outcomes like expanded economic and social opportunities for people in rural areas. But it’s a start … provided that the FCC actually figures out how the subsidies have affected these intermediate outcomes, rather than just measuring trends and claiming the universal service subsidies caused any positive trends observed. We have some suggestions on how to do this.
Our full comment is available here.
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 by President Obama, HJR 37 would effectively nullify the net neutrality rules, and ensure the FCC cannot pass alternate versions of them absent new authority to do so from Congress.
Most commentators believe that the House action was merely symbolic. Passage in the Senate requires only a simple majority, but the neutrality fight has turned violently partisan since the mid-term elections and getting a few Democratic Senators on-board may be hard. More to the point, the White House last week pre-emptively threatened to veto the resolution.
Continue reading →
In the rush of ink that flowed yesterday over AT&T’s announced merger with T-Mobile USA, I posted a long piece on CNET calling for calm, reasoned analysis of the deal by regulators, chiefly the Department of Justice and the FCC.
Since the details of the deal have yet to be fleshed out, it’s hard to say much about the specifics of how customers will be affected in the short or long term. My CNET colleague Maggie Reardon, however, does an excellent job laying out both the technical and likely regulatory issues in a piece posted today from the CTIA conference. Continue reading →
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 the broadcast completely out of context, and to everyone else who chooses to read 2,000 words I’ve written in response.
So all I’ll say here is that Geoff Manne and I taped the program in January, as part of the launch of TechFreedom and of “The Next Digital Decade.” Enjoy!
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 in the net neutrality armageddon.
Everyone believes that without relatively quick action to make more spectrum available, the mobile Internet could seize up. Given the White House’s showcasing of wireless as a leading source of new jobs, investment, and improved living conditions for all Americans, both Congress and President Obama, along with the FCC and just about everyone else, knows this is a crisis that must be avoided.
Indeed, the National Broadband Plan estimates conservatively that mobile users will need 300-500 mhz of new spectrum over the next 5-10 years. Continue reading →
Nate Anderson of Ars Technica has posted an interview with Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) about Defining Internet “Freedom”. Neither Sen. Franken nor Mr. Anderson ever get around to defining that term in their exchange, but the clear implication from the piece is that “freedom” means freedom for the government to plan more and for policymakers to more closely monitor and control the Internet economy. The clearest indication of this comes when Sen. Franken repeats the old saw that net neutrality regulation is “the First Amendment issue of our time.”
As a lover of liberty, I find this corruption of language and continued debasement of the term “freedom” to be extremely troubling. The thinking we see at work here reflects the ongoing effort by many cyber-progressives (or “cyber-collectivists,” as I prefer to call them) to redefine Internet freedom as liberation from the supposed tyranny of the marketplace and the corresponding empowerment of techno-cratic philosopher kings to guide us toward a more enlightened and noble state of affairs. We are asked to ignore our history lessons, which teach us that centralized planning and bureaucracy all too often lead to massively inefficient outcomes, myriad unforeseen unintended consequences, bureaucratic waste, and regulatory capture. Instead, we are asked to believe that high-tech entrepreneurs are the true threat to human progress and liberty. They are cast as nefarious villains and their innovations, we are told, represent threats to our “freedom.” We even hear silly comparisons likening innovators like Apple to something out of George Orwell’s 1984. Continue reading →
Loyal readers know of my generally bullish, optimistic outlook regarding the Internet’s impact on society, economy, and even politics. On that last front, columnist Peggy Noonan has a nice piece in today’s Wall Street Journal entitled, “The Internet Helps Us Get Serious.” Serious about politics and political rhetoric, she means. Speaking about how politicians are addressing the current fiscal crisis in the U.S., Noonan argues:
One way to change minds about the current crisis is through information. We all know this, and we all know about the marvelous changes in technology that allow for the spreading of messages that are not necessarily popular with gatekeepers and establishments. But there’s something new happening in the realm of political communication that must be noted. Speeches are back. They have been rescued and restored as a political force by the Internet.
She then makes the point that I always stress when debating Net pessimists: You have to measure progress against the yardstick of the past and ask yourself if we really better off in a world of information scarcity. Noonan does that beautifully when she notes: Continue reading →
Following up on my Congressional testimony last week, I’ve written two articles on how the House and Senate are moving forward with plans to undo the FCC’s December 23,2010 “Open Internet” order, aka net neutrality. For my inaugural post for Forbes, I write about the experience of being a witness before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, Competition and the Internet, and provide some background on how the FCC found itself backed into a corner that led to the unpopular (on both sides) new rules. See “Deep in the Net Neutrality Trenches.”
On CNET this morning, I review in detail the steps taken last week by Congress. These include two hearings, one featuring all five FCC Commissioners. After the hearings, the House approved an amendment to the on-going budget negotiations that would deny the agency any funding to implement or enforce its rules. Later, both the House and Senate issued a Joint Resolution of Disapproval, which, if passed, would nullify the rule-making and deny the FCC future authority to try again. Continue reading →
To believe some of the worrywarts around Washington, we find ourselves in the midst of a miserable mobile marketplace experience. Regulatory advocates like New America Foundation, Free Press, Public Knowledge and others routinely claim that the sky is falling on consumers and that far-reaching regulation of the wireless sector is needed to save the day.
I hope those folks are still willing to listen to facts, becuase those facts tell a very different story. Specifically, I invite critics to flip through the latest presentation by Internet market watchers Mary Meeker and Matt Murphy of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers on “Top Mobile Internet Trends” and then explain to me how we can label this marketplace anything other than what it really is: One of the greatest capitalist success stories of modern times. Just about every metric illustrates the explosive growth of technological innovation in the U.S. mobile arena. I’ve embedded the entire slideshow down below, but two particular slides deserve to be showcased.
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.