Good evening. I’m not seeing anything huge as we pass the middle of the week. But, you never know what will become important, so let’s take a look at what caught my eye so far this week.
Even as Mary Bono Mack seeks to legislate on the news, or at least introduces a bill to make people feel better, Apple explains that the “location tracking” story was a non-story all along, just as I predicted. It was all about making GPS faster, and there was no real privacy issue.
Oh, yes. ICE is from the government, and it’s here to help. That is, if you’re a big copyright holder, but not if you’re a small patent holder.
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Good evening. Darrell Issa is stepping up the pressure on the FCC. He wants to tie spectrum reallocation incentives to Net Neutrality repeal. Many of us want to be able to reallocate spectrum from television stations to multipurpose wireless data, since we as a society are demanding more and faster data these days. If Darrell Issa makes the FCC’s ability to facilitate that, contingent on Net Neutrality repeal, then we’re playing a game of chicken. Issa: “Until net neutrality is rolled back, I don’t believe Congress is going to be willing to give the FCC any new power.”
It’s a fair position, and I’m ready to back him.
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Happy weekend, all. To get personal, had some real excitement on my end. Preemptively replaced my chair before it fell apart, since the last one I let fall apart collapsed while I was sitting in it. I was lucky the only injury I took was a smack on each arm. But, the new chair had the LUMBAR PAD OF DOOM which started killing my back. I’ve gotten the chair adjusted, pulling the Death Pad™ way back, stopped using my pillow which changed the positioning of the pad on my back, and all should be well now. Yes, I somehow take a profession that involves sitting down and still manage to be injury-prone.
So, we’re back to talking about competition again. The FCC has announced what its rules will be for the AT&T/T-Mobile deal. Says Cnet: “First it has to determine if the deal will meet specific requirements in the Communications Act and FCC rules. And second it will determine if the merger is in the public interest.” I expect that the Communications Act won’t be a big deal, but the “public interest” fudge will be the big fight.
What the left isn’t going to allow the possibility of, though, is the idea that this acquisition might be needed just to keep AT&T competitive with Verizon at the top. Reports like this from the American Consumer Institute should inform the FCC, though. Catch this key takeaway of the market after a series of mergers it’s already seen: “The combination of higher usage and lower prices means that consumer welfare has increased significantly – not what would be expected from a “failed market.””
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That’s one of the most boring and least unique Tech at Night titles ever, but I’m going to war with the links I have.
Slade Gorton’s priorities are horribly wrong. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. On Tuesday the Greg Walden subcommittee held hearings on “Use of Spectrum with Public Safety.” I’ve already explained why I think the D Block of wireless spectrum needs to be allocated directly to public safety, but Gorton’s argument for putting the D block up to auction is ridiculous. So says Energy and Commerce’s press release:
Gorton testified that auctioning “the D Block to the private sector will reduce the deficit, empower huge investments in new technology and job creation, and will meet the very real needs of our vital public safety sector.”
We already tried auctioning the D block. It did none of the above. And why should we try to reduce the deficit with a one-time payment from the pockets of first responders? That seems all wrong to me.
I know civil defense has a mixed record historically, when it was promoted by some as an alternative to tough-minded deterrence of nuclear war. But the threat of retaliation doesn’t work against jihadis. We need to be prepared to react to attacks better than we did on 9/11.
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In case you missed the great news Friday, Net Neutrality was repealed in the House. The resolution now must go to the Senate, where under the Congressional Review Act it cannot be filibustered, so it only needs 51 votes.
And while I do hope that the House will follow up by attempting to repeal the redistributionist data roaming regulations passed last week, other work must be done. On Tuesday, Greg Walden’s subcommittee will hold a hearing on spectrum allocation. I hope they will support allocating the D block to public safety.
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Correction on the title of this piece: His campaign advisory role carried over to a ongoing Presidential advisory role, so “Former” isn’t quite accurate.
Google Chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt tried to use his influence within Google to gain privacy from searches about him, specifically trying to hide his political donations through secret “whitelists” whose existence has only recently been admitted.
This revelation from Steven Levy’s new book In the Plex is not surprising given Schmidt’s high level of political activity, advising candidate Barack Obama on tech issues, and now rumored as a candidate to be the next Secretary of Commerce. He’s in deep politically, and probably doesn’t want that to hurt him personally or in business.
But given Schmidt’s history, he’s now exposed as a massive hypocrite.
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Hello! As is my right, I’m going to start tonight by shamelessly promoting my own piece arguing for the assignment of the D block of wireless spectrum to civil defense and public safety. I keep calling it civil defense because we learned about the need for this after 9/11, and if the actions of the first responders after those attacks wasn’t wartime civil defense, I don’t know what is.
I know some (but certainly not all) libertarian-leaning Republicans oppose this plan, despite or even because the 9/11 commission chairmen have come out for it. But I’m of the view that there are legitimate government roles in society, and that not all things must be (or even should be) sold or given off to the private sector. Civil defense is one of those that is perfectly fine in government hands.
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Remember when I seemed to write about Net Neutrality four times a week, which was really something when I was only posting three times? Well, the AT&T/T-Mobile deal is probably going to get that much discussion for now.
Of course there’s nothing new yet. Discussion is all there is until government actually starts acting. My job is to find the interesting discussion, I suppose. So let’s start with Douglas Holtz-Eakin at NRO, who makes very well the key thing we all must remember when it comes to the wireless market: size isn’t what matters. Competition matters. And as I’ve been saying from the start, taking the sick man in T-Mobile and combining him with the #2 firm only helps competition by putting pressure on the high-flying, LTE-deploying #1 Verizon.
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So the top story this week is going to be the AT&T acquisition of T-Mobile USA. There’s a lot being said about it, about unions, about competition, but the story I’m seeing emerging is that this deal is about spectrum. AT&T sees in T-Mobile a way to get the spectrum it needs going forward. In fact, even power grabbing FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said to the CTIA that this is an issue:
If we do nothing in the face of the looming spectrum crunch, many consumers will face higher prices – as the market is forced to respond to supply and demand – and frustrating service – connections that drop, apps that run unreliably or too slowly.
So not only is T-Mobile a sensible purchase for AT&T in the short run, due to their use of similar technology, but in the long run this is the kind of purchase AT&T may need to be able to compete with Verizon. Verizon, of course, already got more spectrum when it bought the C Block of old television spectrum in 2008.
So if we want competition now and in the future, we need to let the deal happen.
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As I began work on tonight’s late Tech at Night, reports came out of an explosion at a nuclear power plant in Fukushima prefecture, Japan. As Japan continues to deal with an unimaginably strong earthquake and then a devastating tsunami caused by that quake, I hope nobody takes those special circumstances and tries to argue against clean, effective power generation technology in the general case. Let them bury the dead first, clean up, and examine the causes of the problems before we then pause and make intelligent decisions.
Though as much as the earthquake causes me to woolgather about my own earthquake history, life does continue to go on here in America. And in fact, Republicans are getting so aggressive on tech policy issues. Mike Lee in particular has gotten much attention for calling for antitrust hearings against Google in the course of greater Senate committee efforts toward possible Search Neutrality laws. In fact I suspect he’d get even more if not for the Sendai earthquake.
I’m sure it’s infuriating the daylights out of the radicals that one of America’s most prominent TEA Party Senators is in favor of strong government action here, and I don’t know if I agree with it myself, but if Microsoft was vulnerable to years of government harassment despite the fact that anyone, at any time, could easily acquire high-quality competing products, so will Google be despite the existence of major search competitors.
Though if Senator Lee is making this move because of the juicy political effects, more than an actual desire to be a trustbuster, then his move gets two thumbs up from this observer. Ditto Joe Barton’s rumblings of going after Google for the children and their privacy.
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