You are here Corporate Welfare
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.
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Thu, 2007-06-28 12:11
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Wed, 2007-06-27 11:08
Kudos to Robert Hahn and Hal Singer for their outstanding op ed in the Washington Post "Earmarked Airwaves."
- The editorial cogently presents the fork in the road that faces any major FCC decision: to follow law, which promotes competition and market-driven outcomes, or to freelance and try and "manage" competition and pick winners and losers in advance through "spectrum earmarking."
- FCC history is littered with freelance "managed competition" failures, but two are particularly ignominious and highly relevant to this 700 MHz auction:
- the illegal UNE-P scheme to rig telecom competitive outcomes following the 1996 Telecom Act; and
- the Nextwave auction scandal that kept 30 MHz of prime spectrum fallow and tied up in court for almost a decade.
At its core a spectrum auction is the quintessential type of competition. The auction law's purpose in 1993 was to use market forces, competition, to allocate the public's asset most appropriately, largely because previous FCC spectrum allocation processes were so ineffective, unfair and prone to serious abuse and graft.
This 700 MHz auction may be shaping up to be FCC Chairman Kevin Martin's legacy moment: will it be marked by promoting competition and market-based outcomes or will it be marked by standing on the auction scales to ensure the spectrum is "earmarked" to the predetermined, chosen "winner" -- in this case former Clinton-Gore FCC Chairman Reed Hundt's Frontline Wireless company.
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Mon, 2007-06-18 12:56
Can you believe it?
Google launches its new public policy blog today and the NetCompetition/Precursorblog is not one of the blog links under "What We Are Reading!" Horrors!
First of all, it is not very "authentic" of the Google bloggers to not admit that they regularly read Precursorblog -- we know they do!
Second, don't you believe for a minute that Google does not want to know what their latest public policy or PR vulnerability is.
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Mon, 2007-06-18 11:54
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Mon, 2007-06-18 10:49
The New York Times reported a very telling statistic today on one of the prominent Webopolies in the Open Internet Coalition -- eBay.
95% market share! If that's not a Webopoly, what is?
Pages
|