You are here Frontline's proposal is so disingenuous: Let me count the ways
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Tue, 2007-07-03 11:02
Frontline's Reed Hundt is mounting a furious eleventh hour effort to finagle a backroom sweetheart deal for his company from the FCC, in the 700 MHz auction. He attacked the outstanding op ed in the Washington Post by Robert Hahn and Hal Singer in both the Post and in RCR. Our former Big Government FCC Chairman, Mr. Hundt also apparently has lost his cool and perpsective in railing against the rollout of the new, innovative and already successful iPhone as somehow a market failure that only his company can cure.
Let's take apart some of Mr. Hundt's grandest disingenuous claims:
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In his Post Letter to the Editor, Mr. Hundt, outrageously claims: "Frontline Wireless has proposed that the Federal Communications Commission adopt a market-based way to build, at no cost to the taxpayer, a national wireless broadband network for first responders to use."
Mr. Hundt is also disingenuous that his plan is the only way to protect the "homeland." Mr. Hundt would conveniently like people to forget that Congress has already allocated for public safety and first responder use 24Mhz of spectrum (12 Mhz for a national wireless broadband network.) Congress also has allocated roughly a billion dollars for interoperability grants, enhanced 911 programs, and a national alert and tsunami warning system. Seems like the "whole truth" is something that escapes Mr. Hundt's disingenuous "homeland security" defense of his Frontline proposal.
Bottomline: If one looks at the Frontline proposal closely it is not anything like Mr. Hundt likes to characterize it. Mr. Hundt and his Google-gaggle of investors are disingenuously claiming homeland security is their only motivation, however, transfering billions of dollars of taxpayer wealth to Frontline's coffers in an the equivalent of an "auction policy heist," and promoting net neutrality/open access are also very big -- and maybe over riding motivations for Frontline's backers.
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