May 2017

[Commentary] The biggest potential hazard [for public stations in the aftermath of the incentive auction] is that some stations might not even get the money they’ve won. Remember that half of public TV stations are licensed to some bigger organization, like a university or government, which presents a number of editorial conflicts of interest. Here, it also presents a financial conflict: The license-holder gets the spectrum auction money, not the station. In the best-case scenario, a handful of organizations that were lucky enough to own expendable spectrum in electromagnetically crowded places will be able to use their proceeds to permanently endow their existence. That presents one more hazard: complacency.

[Adam Ragusea is a journalist in residence and visiting assistant professor at Mercer University’s Center for Collaborative Journalism.]

[Commentary] While couched in noble terms of promoting competition, innovation and freedom, the Federal Communications Commission soon will combine two initiatives that will enhance the likelihood that Sprint and T-Mobile will stop operating as separate companies within 18 months. In the same manner at the regulatory approval of airline mergers, the FCC will make all sorts of conclusions sorely lacking empirical evidence and common sense.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s game plan starts with a report to Congress that the wireless marketplace is robustly competitive. The Commission can then leverage its marketplace assessment to conclude that even a further concentration in an already massively concentrated industry will not matter. Virtually overnight, the remaining firms will have far less incentives to enhance the value proposition for subscribers as T-Mobile and Sprint have done much to the chagrin of their larger, innovation-free competitors AT&T and Verizon who control over 67% of the market and serve about 275 million of the nation’s 405 million subscribers.

[Rob Frieden serves as Pioneers Chair and Professor of Telecommunications and Law at Penn State University.]

A veteran Washington reporter says he was manhandled by security guards at the Federal Communications Commission, then forced out of the agency’s headquarters as he tried to ask a commissioner questions at a public meeting May 18. John M. Donnelly, a senior writer at CQ Roll Call, said he was trying to talk with FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly one-on-one after a news conference when two plainclothes guards pinned him against a wall with the backs of their bodies. Commissioner O’Rielly saw the encounter but continued walking, Donnelly said in a statement through the National Press Club, where he heads the Press Freedom Team. After Commissioner O’Rielly passed, the statement read, one of the guards asked why Donnelly hadn’t brought up his questions while the commissioner was at the podium. The guard then made him leave the building “under implied threat of force,” the statement read.