Wireless Spectrum

(The updated Google Privacy Rap Sheet is here.)

In response to Google getting sanctioned $7m for privacy violations by 38 State Attorneys General for its unauthorized collection” of private WiFi data nationwide between 2008 and 2010, Google’s public relations mantra is: “we work hard to get privacy right at Google, but in this case we didn’t, which is why we quickly tightened up our systems to address the issue.”

Please don't miss my new Daily Caller Op-ed "The Looming Government Spectrum Scandal" -- here.

• It's Part 5 of my ongoing Government Spectrum Waste, Fraud & Abuse Research Series.

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Government Spectrum Waste Fraud and Abuse Research Series

Part 1: U.S. Government's Obsolete and Wasteful Spectrum Hoarding and Rationing

Please see my Daily Caller Op-ed "America's Real Wireless Problem Is Not Too Little WiFi" -- here.

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Government Spectrum Waste Fraud and Abuse Research Series

Part 1: "U.S. Government's Obsolete and Wasteful Spectrum Hoarding and Rationing"

Today National Public Radio's Diane Rehm Show featured a lively and informative discussion of "The FCC's Proposal for a Free Nationwide Wireless Network" -- based on the Washington Post's top story Monday on the topic of the FCC's "super WiFi" plans.

• The podcast is -- here.

Diane Rehm's guests were:

• Professor Susan Crawford;
• Bloomberg's Todd Shields; and
• Me.

I believe it was a very helpful and informative discussion because it corrected much of the confusion prompted by the Washington Post's cryptic and inaccurate article on the FCC's plans for "Super-WiFi."

It also provided an excellent and appropriate forum to systematically challenge and counter Professor Crawford's selective use of facts in her advocacy that broadband should be regulated like a public utility.

In defense of the FCC's Open Internet Order, which unilaterally mandates net neutrality, four former FCC Commissioners and Professor Susan Crawford argue to an Appeals Court that Verizon and broadband providers should enjoy no broadband freedom of speech under the Constitution.

Why are many of the biggest political supporters of net neutrality focusing their legal defense of net neutrality on the constitutional freedom of speech argument and not the main event of the case, the Comcast vs. FCC precedent, i.e. does the FCC have direct statutory authority to regulate the broadband Internet?

The reason probably has a lot more to do with politics than the Constitution. That's because the net neutrality movement has long analogized and politically marketed net neutrality to be like an individual's freedom of speech under the U.S. Constitution -- in a desperate attempt to make an arcane regulatory pricing issue relevant to the public and to mask that it is a solution of preemptively restricting freedom without evidence of a real freedom problem.

The net neutrality movement has long misrepresented the American Constitutional notion of freedom of speech in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights in two major ways.

For those who have been following my Obsolete Communications Law Series, and those interested in an outstanding and more in-depth free-market analysis of the many communications matters that demand modernization for the digital age, please don't miss: Communications Law and Policy in the Digital Age -- The Next Five Years, edited by Randy May of the Free State Foundation.

• One can get it on Amazon here.

The important work and views of Randy May, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, Seth Cooper, Christopher Yoo, James Speta, Michelle Connolly, Daniel Lyons, Ellen Goodman, and Bruce Owen are a must read for those who want to learn how we can vastly improve current obsolete and increasingly dysfunctional communications law and policy in the United States.

Kudos for an important book well done!

Please see my new power point presentation here entitled: "Modern Beats Obsolete in Spurring Economic Growth and Innovation -- Modernize Obsolete Communications Law and Spectrum Management." It is the culmination of a year of research and presents very powerful evidence of how woefully obsolete and absurdly dysfunctional America's communications policy has become.

This neglected problem has been bipartisan in the making over sixteen administrations and dozens of Congresses. It also will take a long-term bipartisan effort to correct. It will only become increasingly imperative to do so as more and more of our economy and society depends on a fully modern mobile Internet.

After reading this presentation you won't be able to look at current American communications policy in the same way again. America's got a lot of work to do to ensure our leadership in the Internet and high tech continues and is not slowed by the nonsensical and unnecessary drag on investment, innovation and growth of obsolete law and spectrum resource management.

Please don't miss the charts. An outline of the presentation follows:

Now we know the real reason why there has been such strong opposition by FreePress and other net neutrality proponents to the common sense economic notion of broadband usage pricing. The newly launched Open Wireless Movement now wants to turn everyone's home WiFi routers into interconnected, free, public-community, "open WiFi" hotspots.

Please see my new Daily Caller Op-ed: "A Welcome Catalyst for Modernizing Obsolete Communications Law & Regulation" -- here.

• This is part 15 of my Obsolete Communications Law research series.

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Obsolete Communications Law research series:

Part 1: "Obsolete communications law stifles innovation, harms consumers"

Like most analysts, I am not persuaded by the stated rationale and synergies SoftBank has put forth to justify its acquisition of Sprint. At bottom the deal is financial engineering: balance sheet and exchange rate arbitrage; and market timing. It appears to be a financial partnership, not the stated strategic partnership.

SoftBank hopes its shareholders will imagine that the 2013 and beyond U.S. experience of a maturing wireless smart-phone market and Sprint's late-iPhone-entrant role will somehow be analogous to SoftBank's iPhone first-mover experience in 2008 Japan. That's like asserting rock-climbing uphill is analogous with sliding downhill because they both involve hills.