It’s easy to make fun of government regulators, since they’re political people doing technical jobs. But these remarks by Commissioner Copps on the 700 MHz auction indicate the man actually has a clue:
Third, the FCC needs to make sure that it has, in-building or via contract, the expertise it needs to contribute network, technical and operational knowledge to this effort and to play its honest broker role. We need people who understand how to build cellular networks and how much it costs to do so. For example, as we decide the geographic coverage requirements for the new network, we need to know what the cost difference is for building out to 90 percent versus 99 or 99.3 percent of the nation’s population. We need to understand the costs and benefits, in sparsely-populated areas especially, of supplementing terrestrial build-out with satellite technology. There are hundreds of highly technical questions, I recognize, but we cannot write rules that strike the right balance if we are not fluent in these details.
So my message is that we need the experts. If we don’t have enough experts today, we need to contract for them or to impanel a technical advisory group. If we can’t get our hands on this kind of advice, then the FCC has no business even attempting to write rules for this auction.
The contract route is the way to go, since I doubt the Commission can pay experts the going rate.
While Martin was a big disappointment, the other Commissioners impressed me positively. McDowell and Tate were on the right side from the get-go, but even the Democrats, Copps and Adelstein, impressed me at the Berkman Center hearing.
Adelstein asked me an astute question, the final one of the hearing: “how do we distinguish good network management from bad?” That was really the crux of the whole thing. So I filed some comments following the hearing with a checklist of criteria, since there’s no single rule unless it’s anti-competitive conduct. But the rub is how you tell such conduct from something that might produce an anti-competitive side-effect. There’s no magic wand you can wave, so the trick is to assess the practice according to a set of criteria for rational conduct and look for deviations. You have some coin-toss moments in designing a complex system, and if more than one adds up to a side effect, it probably isn’t a side effect.