CTO Chopra not sweating potential decline in spectrum auction revenue due to merger

Federal Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra was the guest this week on C-SPAN's "The Communicators."

He suggested that he is not concerned that the proposed merger of AT&T and T-Mobile could shrink the revenue from prospective spectrum auctions. The White House has endorsed spectrum auctions as a way to raise nearly $30 billion to build a public safety network, invest in research and development, and pay down the deficit. If approved by Congress, the mechanism would offer incentives to TV broadcasters to sell off their spectrum so it can be repurposed to mobile broadband. But lately, the Federal Communications Commission/White House campaign to jolt Congress into passing auction legislation has been plagued by questions about how much money the auctions will raise. The proposed combination of AT&T and T-Mobile has provoked concerns that revenue would plummet in a post-merger world where T-Mobile wouldn't bid and AT&T would have a mitigated need for spectrum.