Activists Celebrate Wireless Gains, Relish Prospect of Obama Presidency
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Prospects are bright for building under an Obama White House on successes by supporters of Carterfone, net neutrality rules and open spectrum for wireless broadband, leading activists said. Groundbreaking changes probably will come Nov. 4 with the arrival of a friendly national administration and FCC white- space rules, said President Andrew Schwartzman of the Media Access Project Tuesday at an open-wireless conference of Google and the New America Foundation. “Policy makers are ready to listen,” he said: “There’s likely to be a very receptive environment going forward.”
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But the opportunities make it more important than ever for high tech to shed the remnants of its aversion to getting its hands dirty in Washington, Schwartzman said. The industry must “drop its fear of Washington,” he said: “It’s necessary to engage.” Silicon Valley’s “libertarian philosophy” overlooks the reality that “government intervention is a tool that can be used to stop innovation, to stall,” Schwartzman said: “The government is there, whether we like it or not.”
Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., “gets it,” Schwartzman said. “He understands net neutrality. He understand the value of policies that promote technology. He wants a chief technology officer” in the federal government. Obama’s Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain, Ariz., thinks companies will innovate “without government intervention,” and he “wants a very deregulatory approach,” Schwartzman said. But incumbents -- broadcasters, cable companies and big telcos -- “do not want innovation,” he said. They want to “slow things down,” Schwartzman said.
Columbia University Law Professor Tim Wu looked back with satisfaction on progress since early last year, when he wrote a paper for the New America Foundation in favor of wireless Carterfone. Industry and FCC changes have been “mostly for the better,” he said. Wu pointed to Skype’s wireless Carterfone petition to the FCC, the commission’s open-access rules for the C-block spectrum auction, the Open Development program of auction winner Verizon Wireless, that carrier’s settlement with New York’s attorney general over its “unlimited data plan” claims, Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android operating system.
Wu is “pretty happy,” he said. “Things have gone in [a] generally positive direction, with some exceptions,” he said. But Wu said AT&T and Verizon Wireless may use their “chokehold” to keep openness and innovation from spreading. “The Android model is a threat to their culture and their way of making money,” he said. Google may “outflank” the large U.S. carriers by building unstoppable momentum for Android through deals with giant service providers in China and elsewhere, Wu said.
The next frontier is extending net neutrality principles to cellular, Wu said. They would be needed, for instance, to prevent AT&T from blocking Hulu.com to protect its mobile bandwidth against video traffic, he said. Michael Calabrese, the director of the foundation’s Wireless Future Program, announced that Wu had become a fellow with the organization.