March 2017

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission is finishing an “incentive auction” of broadcast spectrum by which it created a market to match the price at which broadcasters were willing to sell spectrum with the price mobile operators were willing to pay. A bipartisan group of House Commerce Committee members described the outcome this way: “The incentive auction’s conclusion with more than $19 billion in bids marks the end of the second-largest auction and years of successful work in bringing market forces to bear on spectrum use policy. … Not only did the auction successfully encourage investment and competition by bringing 70 MHz of licensed and 14 MHz of unlicensed spectrum to meet our nation’s wireless broadband needs, but it also generated $7 billion for deficit reduction.” How did such a success occur and what lessons does it bring to today’s environment? Three stand out.

First, begin with a clear problem statement and generate bipartisan support for solving the problem.
Second, the solution should flow from a process that is transparent, fair, invites all to share credit and incorporates insights from a spectrum of stakeholders.
There’s one more lesson that might prove more controversial, though it shouldn’t. That is that smart, data-driven economic policy will create far more jobs and economic growth than ad hoc, stunt-driven events.

[Blair Levin is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institute Metropolitan Policy Project]

[Commentary] New Jersey auctioned off a public treasure - several of its public TV stations - for possibly hundreds of millions of dollars with little public debate or any idea what the governor plans to do with the money. This windfall has received shockingly little public attention. But here's the good news: It's not too late to seize this moment and use this money to transform New Jersey into the national leader in digital public media, local journalism, and civic technology.

Gov Chris Christie (R-NJ) isn't sharing his plans thus far, but the short-sighted solution is use it to plug some of the holes in the lame-duck governor's final budget. The much better idea is to take the revenue from selling off the remnants of 20th-century public media and invest it in building innovative 21st-century public-interest media that meets New Jersey residents' information needs.

[Craig Aaron is the president and CEO of Free Press and the Free Press Action Fund.]

[Commentary] I often run across the belief, expressed in print or in person, that Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act allows for bulk collection of information and that it offers no protections whatsoever for non-US persons. Both of these are urban legends; neither of them is factually correct. 702 does not allow collection of bulk data, and 702 does not allow indiscriminate collection of non-US-person communication.

As I testified to Congress, it’s my belief, based on my personal experience and professional judgment, that Congress drew the balance of authority and restrictions in the right place when it enacted FAA 702 in 2008 and when it reauthorized it in 2012. This year provides an important opportunity to FISA Amendments Act to be carefully scrutinized once again. But as Congress continues its work, it’s worth remembering that things that aren’t broke don’t need fixing. Sometimes they just need to be extended as-is.

[April Doss is a partner and chair of the Cybersecurity and Privacy practice group at Saul Ewing. Prior to that, she spent over a decade at the National Security Agency, where she was the Associate General Counsel for Intelligence Law. ]