The FCC could still rig upcoming spectrum auctions to keep AT&T and Verizon Wireless from making a play for more licenses, despite provisions in the Spectrum Act, said Fred Campbell, director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Communications Liberty and Innovation Project, in a Tuesday blog (http://xrl.us/bn5whz). Section 640 of the act was “clearly intended to prevent the FCC from imposing ‘eligibility restrictions’ in an auction,” he said. The bad news for the AT&T and Verizon is the section contains a “loophole,” Campbell said. “It says that the prohibition against eligibility restrictions doesn’t affect ‘any authority the Commission has to adopt and enforce rules of general applicability, including rules concerning spectrum aggregation that promote competition,'” he wrote. “This exception gives the FCC the flexibility to adjust the amount of spectrum that can be held by any mobile provider on a band-by-band basis before every auction. If this flexibility is abused, it could become the exception that swallows the rule.” Campbell was Wireless Bureau chief under former FCC Chairman Kevin Martin.
The FCC should develop a spectrum screen that’s clear and predictable, and not reimpose the spectrum cap the agency did away with in 2003, CTIA said in comments filed on the commission’s September mobile holdings notice of proposed rulemaking. T-Mobile said the FCC should impose spectrum caps for frequencies acquired in an auction. Meanwhile, public interest groups concerned about the concentration of licensed spectrum in too few hands said the agency should make more aggressive changes in its approach to examining spectrum holdings.
The rest of the world is watching to see whether the U.S. will regulate a portion of the Internet, and FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell finds the idea “a little unsettling,” he said at a Silicon Flatirons conference on spectrum policy Tuesday. The danger, he said, is that a bad idea adopted by U.S. policymakers could get “amplified abroad” as teams at the ITU read everything the FCC writes. McDowell also discussed ideas for getting more spectrum into the hands of consumers, and endorsed the idea of paying federal users to get off their spectrum.
Federal users need financial incentives to get off their spectrum, FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said Tuesday at a conference on the next ten years of spectrum policy. Giving federal users the proceeds from spectrum auctions could be a “catalyst” to get federal frequencies into the hands of commercial users, and let the commission reach the 500 MHz benchmark for new wireless broadband use called for in a 2010 executive order, she said. Rosenworcel urged creating model rules for tower siting, and an “honest conversation” about network reliability after storms like superstorm Sandy. The conference was presented at the Pew Research Center by CTIA, Public Knowledge and the Silicon Flatirons Center.
Change is on the way at the FCC, with Chairman Julius Genachowski widely expected to step down some time next year after nearly four years in the job. Change won’t be nearly as sweeping as what would have followed a Mitt Romney victory and the likely reversal of several key Obama administration policy calls, starting with 2010 net neutrality rules, government and industry officials told us Wednesday.
Ten congressional Democrats from Massachusetts urged the FCC to ensure that the spectrum auctions undergo a transparent rule making process, in a letter made public Wednesday. The commission should provide stakeholders with “ample opportunity to evaluate and understand how any proposed changes will specifically impact them” before the process is finalized, they said. Massachusetts is unique in that its spectrum holdings are constrained by existing international agreements with Canada, they said, and the spectrum auction should take that into account. The letter was signed by Reps. Ed Markey, John Olver, James McGovern, John Tierney, Michael Capuano, Stephen Lynch, Niki Tsongas, William Keating, Richard Neal, and Barney Frank.
The election is almost certain to mean a change in leadership at the FCC, with Julius Genachowski widely expected to leave in early 2013 even if President Barack Obama is reelected. As is typical for this point in an election cycle, rumors are swirling in the communications industry about who will take over.
Former FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said he’s uncertain if the 113th Congress, which convenes in January, could pass comprehensive reform of the 1996 Telecom Act, during a Bloomberg event Wednesday. Passing a comprehensive telecom reform bill through regular order hinges on how many Senate seats Republicans pick up in November, and at the moment neither party is projected to attain a super-majority of 60 seats. “Even if the Republicans take over the [Senate] majority, we anticipate they won’t have the numbers … so you will have to have some agreement with some portion of Democrats to get it through regular order,” said Martin, now an attorney at Patton Boggs.
Spectrum policy historically has been viewed as essentially non-political, but that’s changing rapidly. The most recent example is last week’s FCC order that should mean greater use of the wireless communications service band for wireless broadband (CD Oct 17 p1). Industry observers told us that the politicization of spectrum has been all but inevitable, as the world goes wireless.
The Department of Defense understands carriers’ needs for spectrum for wireless broadband, but DOD needs certainty on its own spectrum as well, said Maj. Gen. Robert Wheeler at CTIA’s MobileCON show in San Diego Wednesday. That keynote by the DOD deputy chief information officer was a rare appearance by a senior DOD official at a CTIA conference.