Wireless Spectrum

In a filing to the FCC on the National Broadband Plan, the DOJ Antitrust Division, the U.S Government's leading expert in assessing the state of competition in communications markets, implicitly rejected net neutrality proponents' core thesis of broadband market failure.

If you are interested in learning great "pearls of wisdom" based on expansive experience and clarity-of-thought on the question of wireless innovation, and proposed Internet regulation of wireless innovation, please read the Farber-Faulhaber white paper; at a minimum, please read the many wonderful highlights that I have pulled out of the paper for you below.

Professor Dave Farber, a widely respected Internet pioneer who has been called the "grandfather of the Internet" for his contributions to computer science, and a former Chief Technologist for the FCC, co-authored an important white paper with Professor Faulhaber for the FCC's Wireless innovation Notice of Inquiry.

Highlights from this outstanding paper:

With due to credit to "Ripley's Believe it or Not!^®," so much odd and bizarre is happening in Washington in the "name" of "wireless innovation" and competition that the topic calls for its own collection of: "Believe it or Not!^®" oddities.

Choice, having the benefit of a selection of different alternatives to choose from, springs from the risk and opportunity of market competition  -- not from Government economic regulation.

Kudos to Steve Pociask of the American Consumer Institute for his research reminding regulators that American consumers enjoy the most competitive, useful, and innovative wireless market in the world.

In reviewing the stats that matter most, the U.S. is far ahead of the rest of the world.

• Americans use 600 more wireless minutes a month than the average OECD country, which is 2-5 times more usage to put it in perspective.
• Americans also pay 10 cents per minute less than the average European does.

We constantly hear from anti-competition forces that competition doesn't work.

• The evidence that they are dead wrong is overwhelming.
• Competition works!

   

   

   

There is a new circular logic argument being offered that in effect takes fast rural deployment of broadband hostage to the net neutrality movement's latest demands for net neutrality to be put above all other broadband or Internet goals.

• A post by Stacey Higginbotham of Gigaom effectively connects Free Press' latest demand that the FCC apply net neutrality to wireless for the first time and argues in her post that if wireless providers are allowed to apply for stimulus grants for rural broadband without mandated net neutrality, they somehow could control what a subscriber could access on the Internet.

Given that eBay's announced spin-off/IPO of Skype in 2010 is a material market event, this high-profile IPO represents a potentially tectonic development in eBay-Skype's (and FreePress') push for wireless net neutrality/Carterfone regulations and applying the FCC's broadband principles to wireless providers for the first time. There are much broader implications of this market development than many appreciate.

Some brief background information is helpful to understand the broader implications:  

AP "reporter" Peter Svensson appears to be up to his old tricks again masking his advocacy for Net neutrality as objective journalism -- in his AP article: "Cox Communications to try a new way to handle online congestion, giving priority to some traffic."  

In the first and fourth sentences of Mr. Svensson's "report" he editorializes:

• First sentence: "Cox Communications... stepped onto the battleground of the net neutrality issue Tuesday..."
• Fourth sentence: "The news is sure to revive the debate about "Net Neutrality," or the question of how much Internet service providers can interfere with subscriber traffic."

How can Mr. Svensson be so "sure" of such a thing unless he is planning personally to "revive" the net neutrality debate through his close coordination with FreePress?

Lost in the crush of news of late, was the latest FCC report on wireless competition, which shows that the U.S. is leading the world in mobile broadband and wireless competition.

Kudos to Tom Hazlett and Vernon Smith for a cogent free market stance against Google's attempt to communalize the airwaves for Google's benefit -- in a great Op Ed in the Wall Street Journal today.

The authors are dead right to challenge Google's "free the airwaves" campaign on spectrum.  Google does not use the word "free" the way most people use it. When they say "free the airwaves," Google is saying, like it does in its push for net neutrality and open access, that it seeks to turn the airwaves in to a public commons where spectrum is communalized, not owned or licensed, available to anyone at no cost to use.