Obama proposes to boost public airwaves fees

The Obama administration's proposed 2010 budget seeks to significantly boost the user fees the US government charges holders of public airwaves held by many telephone and wireless companies. Yearly fees for spectrum licenses are proposed to rise to $200 million in 2010, from $50 million in 2009. After that, the fees eventually increase to $550 million per user per year, totalling $4.8 billion over the next decade. The administration also wants Congress to give the FCC the green light to authorize the auction of domestic satellite spectrum, hoping to generate $200 million from such bidding by 2019.

Interestingly, Obama's spectrum fee plan will play out in political and economic circumstances that are strikingly similar to those of the early 1990s, when the Federal Communications Commission was first given authority to utilize auctions to award wireless licenses. Democrats — which controlled Congress in the early 1990s when former President Clinton was attempting to erase a less oppressive budget deficit — authorized spectrum auctions for the first time. Democrats had consistently opposed spectrum auctions proposed by Republican administrations. It was only when Clinton proposed spectrum auctions in his first budget that Democrats had a change of heart over a revenue-raising licensing mechanism they had regarded as radical in prior years.