Buying or pacifying?

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In a blog post entitled “Buying regulation,” Susan Crawford wonders about the legality of the FCC reserve price scheme for the 700 MHz rules. (I.e., as long as the $4.6 billion reserve price is met for the much coveted C Block, then open access rules will apply. If the reserve price isn’t met, then the rules go away.) Crawford asks,

Think about it. How can the FCC condition regulations … on the payment of money? And then have the rules dissolve if it doesn’t get the money? This is such a pure quid pro quo - it’s government for sale. Completely screwy. But how do you say “completely screwy” in legalese?

Well, it is certainly a creative gambit by Kevin Martin to make Google put their money where their mouth is, and I don’t have an opinion about whether it’s technically legal. That said, I’m not sure it’s exactly a “quid pro quo.” It’s not as if the highest bidder gets their preferred rules applied to the spectrum block. One can conceive of AT&T, for example, winning the auction at a price above $4.6 billion and therefore being subject to rules it dislikes. What I think the scheme is meant to do is pacify Congress by addressing the concern that given the restrictive rules the spectrum block might fetch much less than the many billions Congress is anticipating (and probably has already spent).

Oct 8, 2007 | Comment | Tags: , ,

Media and neutrality regulation: contradictions?

Susan Crawford asks a good question: How does one reconcile being both “for” network neutrality regulation and rules against media concentration?

To be “for” network neutrality, it seems natural to have the view that the internet is displacing many prior forms of communications modalities — the press is in a free fall, people are watching much less broadcast television, etc. — and so it’s even more important to get internet access policy right and avoid gatekeepers. You’d want to talk about the empowering, emergent communications taking place online.

But to be “for” limits on media ownership, it may be necessary to argue that nothing much has changed. You have to claim that broadcast and newspapers control news and culture, and so it’s important to avoid more consolidation. The internet isn’t changing the local news picture, you’d have to say, and so its existence doesn’t change the media landscape. Blogs aren’t legitimate alternative news sources.

One logical response might be that big media does control information and culture despite the emerging competition of the net and precisely because of this should we have neutrality regulations to protect the fledgling voices. Media ownership rules would also be necessary until the emerging competition on the net actually serves as a check on concentrated media. That’s just me thinking out loud, but I’m sure it’s not too off the mark from the argument we’re likely to see. What I always want to know, and what is rarely made clear, is how much competition is enough to make regulation unnecessary in either context.

Feb 27, 2007 | Comment | Tags: , ,

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