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Tech at Night: Broadband, FCC lies, Wireless, Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, Internet Tax

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  April 30th, 2011 at 01:30 AM  | 

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Tech at Night

Good evening. Here’s a bit I’d never expect to read from the San Francisco Chronicle about Sprint’s begging for the FCC to pick winners and losers, instead of just standing aside and letting AT&T and T-Mobile get together:

At a time when wireless service is getting cheaper and more innovative, there is no reason for a Depression-era bureaucracy like the FCC to step in and regulate a dynamic and competitive marketplace.

Well put, I say. Even if the FCC’s Section 706 report on Broadband competition is a work of fiction. When 85% of US Census Tracts have two or more broadband providers according to your own numbers, and 98% have one or more, to give the industry a failing grade on infrastructure is a politically-motivated lie. The FCC is not doing its job honesty. They’re looking to regulate a booming industry (broadband user at home have gone up from 8 to 200 million Americans since 2000) to impose a socialist agenda. We must stop them and call out the lies.

Don’t believe me? Ask FCC Commissioners Robert McDowell and Meredith Baker. McDowell says that “America has made impressive improvements” since 2000. Baker says she is “troubled” by the failing grade. They know the truth, and the FCC isn’t telling it.

Anyway, it’s official. AT&T and Deutsche Telekom on Thursday requested to transfer licenses from T-Mobile to AT&T. We need the FCC to stay out of this. Both AT&T and T-Mobile lag in the wireless technology race as Verizon, Sprint, and Clearwire deploy 4G technology. If we want a competitive market, we need them to make the deal.

And as much as I’m mistrustful of Google, this lawsuit is stupid. People are running off half-cocked, reacting to smart technology that speeds GPS and saves battery, looking for a quick buck from deep pockets. It’s shameful. It’s the kind of thing that makes a person turn to Ayn Rand.

To close the night, let’s talk some more about Internet taxes. I do mention California often enough. I live here. It’s close and I have a stake in it. CalWatchDog has what appears to be a pretty comprehensive case against California’s plans, aimed largely at selected firms like Amazon. California, like the FCC, wants to pick winners and losers. Don’t worry though; Amazon won’t take it lying down. Ask South Carolina about that.

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  • http://www.dirkworld.com dirkbelig

    While you’re right about the Google suit being another case of lottery-sized “jackpot justice”, your sneering enthusiasm for limited choice and competition along with HIGHER prices as T-Mobile gets swallowed by big evil AT&T and Sprint finds itself on the outside having bet on the wrong flavor of 4G. (They run WiMax thru Clearwire, but the other three are on the LTE bandwagon.)

    I used to have a T-Mobile phone because they were inexpensive and only required one-year contracts. I switched to Sprint for the poor Palm Pre (a great OS wrapped in poorly made hardware) and then moved to the EVO 4G. While I get a nice service discount thru work, even if I paid retail I’d save over $500 per year on service compared to the bandits at AT&T and Verizon.

    My girlfriend asked me why I didn’t have an iPhone and I replied that while the $200 for the handset itself wasn’t a problem, the $130+ per month service contract was simply unreasonable as they heaped on text packages and data plans. Sprint offers unlimited data, evenings that start at 7, free calls to any mobile phone, and more at a lower price. It’s baffled me that they’d still be shedding customers to more expensive and control-freaky carriers. Verizon was legendary for having phone features crippled or turned into pay items and AT&T’s contempt for users currently freezes them out of all the free apps that Amazon’s Appstore for Android because they can’t install non-Marketplace apps. Why pay more for less.

    While I respect the desire for unfettered, survival of the fittest, capitalism, what you’re advocating is AT&T and Verizon to swallow up/wipe out the little guys which inevitably will lead to higher prices, less customer choice. and a strangled mobile market.

  • conservativecurmudgeon

    It is a Federal Bureaucracy, and that is what Federal Bureaucracies DO, in this case, going back to the early days of Television, when the FCC bankrupted the DuMont Network. Heck, go back further to the first Radio Acts and they simply eliminated low-power, small market radio operations that weren’t politically well connected.

    The bigger foundational issue, though, as your article makes clear is: Why is there even a Federal Communications Commission? The underlying assumption is that the beneficent government can always do a better job of sorting out the chaos of the marketplace better than the marketplace itself can, as if it somehow operates above human greed and capriciousness, which, as a human construct, it cannot do.

    As Milton Friedman so eloquently points out, the free market system is the most moral and the most powerful force for good on the planet, and the more it is allowed to move unfettered, the more good it tends to deliver. Even with an IPhone.

  • http://seekingliberty.wordpress.com fmaidment

    While I respect the desire for unfettered, survival of the fittest, capitalism, what you?re advocating is AT&T and Verizon to swallow up/wipe out the little guys which inevitably will lead to higher prices, less customer choice. and a strangled mobile market.

    …Which leads to fatter margins. Which leads to interest from other parties in the market. Which leads to new entrants and new innovation and greater competition.

    If you really “respect the desire for unfettered, survival of the fittest, capitalism” as you claim, then you should learn a thing or two about the economics behind it. This is what economists call “creative destruction”. The poor performers die or are swallowed up, the top performers grow, then when they get fat, dumb and happy we get new players.

    Remember, it was government regulation that gave us AT&T’s monopolistic domination of the home telephone market. Government regulation to force competition among weaker competitors is no less destructive and will only harm AT&T and T-Mobile (and by extension, consumers), not help.

    Preventing companies from strengthening themselves today just because we don’t like how the marketplace may look harms those companies in the future and stifles efficiency and creativity due to the lack of resources. Allowing them to merge (and yes, risk monopolistic behavior) allows them to provide more, not less. When they stop providing more, they’ll be supplanted by something else. Look at Microsoft. Sure, they’re still technically No. 1, but how many Windows Mobile devices are being sold compared to Apple and Android devices? HP even chose to buy Palm and use their WebOS platform instead of continuing to deal with Microsoft!

    Give any monopoly without a consumer focus a little time and, without government interference, it will destroy itself. So while we may face short-term hardship (I don’t see it, not with 2 big and 1 medium-sized competitor), keep the government out of it and we’ll soon see competition re-emerge.

  • rogershru2

    I don’t pay “130+” per month and I have two iPhones with AT&T, unlimited voice, data, and messaging.

  • http://www.nighttwister.com NightTwister

    And that’s just ridiculous. There was also the issue of the Motorola Droid 2 that they added a root detection chip. If you rooted the phone it completely disabled it and voided the warranty. T-Mobile has always been about openness and innovation, while AT&T has always been about control. I’d like to think they’ll find a happy middle ground after the merger, but I have my doubts.

  • muckdog

    I think the government just wants to figure out how they can create more government jobs and have more control. And they need taxes and fees to run it.

  • ajshea

    The FCC replaced the Federal Radio Commission, which was created to regulate who used what radio frequency and how much power they were allowed. Yes, that regulates business in a sense, because it picks “winners” and “losers” – if you can’t run a million watt AM station does that make you a loser?

    If we didn’t have the FCC that’s what we’d have: some giant radio station would plunk a million watt AM station right on top of somebody else’s radio frequency, and the only way to resolve it would be the courts. And generally, the one with the most money wins in the courts.

    If you have a free for all on the radio and television waves that’s monopoly, not free market. You can’t have a free market without some arbiter setting and enforcing standards.

    We need to reign in the FCC, no question. But I would not abolish the FCC any more than I would abolish the FAA.

  • conservativecurmudgeon

    The underlying supposition you’ve presented is that you have an assumed static economic model: Once the million-watt radio station was up an running, there would be no free market response.

    Of course there would be. People wouldn’t just roll over, and accept it with the flow of their dollars and goods. Maybe people would have purchased more player piano rolls, or wax cylinders for the ol’ parlor gramophone, or maybe there would have been some sort of response invented the likes of which we cannot conceive by virtue of the fact that we are 80 years into the present paradigm.

    I tend to challenge the whole idea of “the public airwaves”. There was no governmental thought that bent in that direction until Marconi and Edison spent their own private brain-sweat and capital to invent it. What if the Government had put some sort of ban on the use of “the ether” back when they thought there WAS an ether? These men would have shrugged their shoulders and said to Heck with This. I’ll go invent an electric what-have-you.

    Government coerces. It doesn’t nurture. It cannot by its very definition.

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    Is it out of Das Kapital?

  • rogershru2

    “While I respect the desire for unfettered, survival of the fittest, capitalism, what you?re advocating is AT&T and Verizon to swallow up/wipe out the little guys which inevitably will lead to higher prices, less customer choice. and a strangled mobile market.”

    Could you please provide examples of this effect? Be specific please. Please try to use a somewhat analogous example.

  • ajshea

    The FCC sets the rules of the road for what is and isn’t allowable on the radio waves. The history of radio in this country was that there was no law and it got so bad with some huge radio stations wiping out other stations that Congress finally stepped in to create some order.

    Once you have a million watt AM radio station, nobody else in this hemisphere can use that frequency – they get steamrolled.

    I’m a radio engineer. I have worked (and still do work) with radio stations in the developing world where there are often no rules – or the rules that are there are not enforced. It can get very hard for your radio station to be heard when you’re trying to obey the rules and almost nobody else does (including the government radio station).

    That’s not a level playing field, it ends up turning into an arms race. The consumer/customer/public is not well served by such a situation – some points of view are essentially shut down and others are shut out.