Competition: "I do not think that word means what you think it means." · Sun Jul 15, 09:57 AM by Martin H. Bosworth
GigaOm’s Paul Kapustka has been parsing the rumors that Kevin Martin will support putting the open wireless spectrum on the auction block, and from what he’s found, Martin is again claiming to be for something while actually being against it:
Though Martin’s draft version of the 700 MHz rules haven’t yet been officially revealed, Frontline co-founder Reed Hundt has seen and heard enough of what Martin proposes, to call it a “dreadful plan” that favors incumbent telcos over new entrants, while paying lip service to the word “open.”
GigaOm founder Om Malik followed this up with a blistering—and deserved—castigation of Martin’s telco-friendly policies that ensure incumbents continue to get rich while we’re stuck with slow broadband speeds, high prices, and lack of availability unless you live in rich suburbs or core cities (and sometimes not even then).
The simple truth is that telecom policy under the Bush administration is directly adversarial to consumer interests. This may seem obvious, but some people are still not connecting the dots—you can’t trust any of Bush’s cronies to play fair on anything the American people want. The FTC wrote a massive 170-page report that basically boiled down to “Trust the markets to handle net neutrality,” and the only reason the FCC is making any kind of positive action at all is because they’ve been hammered by grassroots action and media attention.
The best way to circumvent current telco monopolization is for a company like, say, Google, to buy up lots of unused fiber and start building their own network, or for the wireless spectrum to be used to build a wireless network. Until those possibilities come to light, we have to fight to treat the Internet like a public good that belongs to us all, and not a playtoy for the likes of Kevin Martin and his Kabuki dancing. Don’t trust him when he says he’s for something—it usually means the opposite.
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