A group of high-tech companies and public interest groups led by Google and Skype sent a letter today to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin saying that his draft order on the upcoming 700 MHz auctions doesn’t go far enough in providing “open access” to the soon-to-be-available airwaves. Martin’s plan calls for setting aside some spectrum for bidders to allow interoperability of handsets with their services.
The coalition instead urged Martin to go beyond this concept and embrace four “opens” when it comes to the spectrum. Aside from the “open” device criterion which Martin already advocates, they want:
—Open Applications: Customers should be able to freely transport their applications from carrier to carrier. For example, if a customer is using iTunes on an AT&T service, the customer should be free to use iTunes on a Verizon Wireless service without having to, say, subscribe to a special service such as Vcast. The group argues that “even if consumers are free to use the device of their own choosing with a given network, that device will be of little value if the network owner can dictate what services a consumer can access.”
—Open Services: Wholesale customers must have access to wireless network elements, such as geo-location information or quality of service tiers, on a non-discriminatory basis. “If a consumer can take a device from one network to another, but each time faces a new ‘gatekeeper’ limiting access to the broader network, the advantage of the open device and open applications rules are lost.”
—Open Networks: This is the ultimate “open” access requirement. The group wants the FCC to mandate that licensees resell their capacity on a wholesale basis to third-party service providers. The goal is to dilute the full control that winning bidders, who are most lilkely to be incumbent providers, have over the new spectrum. The letter says that contrary to the claims of incumbents such as AT&T and Verizon Wireless, big bucks financial firms are willing to back new entrants even if this kind of requirement were in place.
Although the letter is unlikely to sway Chairman Martin, it is a sign that Google in particular plans to put up an organized political fight to ensure that this new “third pipeline” isn’t operated under the duopoly conditions of the first two pipes.
Without the license conditions proposed here, the advantages enjoyed by incumbents in spectrum auctions allow them to freeze out new entrants, eliminate rival business models, and deprive the American people of the total value of one of our most rare and precious public resources.
Cynthia Brumfield at 6:09 PM|Comments(0)
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