NCTA’s Powell: FCC Needs to Get Out of Mergers and Into Giving Wireless Its Due

Former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Michael Powell, now president of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, says the FCC needs to be relieved of its merger review authority and made to understand that it needs to take wireless into account when it is looking at the competitive broadband market.

He argues the FCC’s role in merger reviews duplicates the efforts of Justice and the FTC for "trivial gains compared with the cost of the exercise.” He pointed out that reviews of mergers in other sectors -- like oil, gas or food -- some of which he suggested were even more important than communications mergers, were not subject to a similar dual gauntlet. He also suggested that the "dark side" of the FCC's merger review role was a sort of conditions "bazaar" created by the vague public interest standard. Powell got some pushback from panelist Blair Levin, now with the Aspen Institute, but formerly architect of the FCC's National Broadband Plan. Levin said that while wireless was a competitor for phone service, and that wireless broadband was obviously a big phenomenon, the broadband plan was skeptical that wireless would translate to cord-cutting, seeing most people as having both. He said he was not sure that, even with the incentive auctions, the FCC would be able to free up enough spectrum to allow wireless to compete in broadband, and added that usage caps could also make that competition problematic.