Democracy & Technology Blog Oil and Water: Lessons from the Past
Last week’s Senate Commerce Committee hearings on the digital TV spectrum transition were important in their own right. But they also got me thinking about a related telecom issue: municipal telecom networks.
It now seems most parties are satisfied with a “hard date” transition of the 700 MHz band (UHF TV channels 52-69) in 2008. This means broadcasters will go all digital in a smaller spectrum band, and the vast and mostly vacant 700 MHz space will be opened up for all sorts of new technologies and services. This is a good thing, but by the time it happens, it will have been almost 20 years — twenty! — since this process began. Huge amounts of great spectrum have been mostly empty and idle for years. Time is money, and this process has wasted a lot of both.
Why has this transition been such a failure? Because of the supposedly “public” nature of the “airwaves.” In the “public interest,” the FCC in 1952 allocated spectrum to a few broadcasters, who have remained powerful politically even as their programming and business models have lost to cable, satellite, and the Internet. The quasi-public-private nature of broadcast TV calcified the industry and prevented resources (spectrum) from being deployed most productively.
Although not perfectly analogous, this tale should alert us to the pitfalls of new municipal broadband networks, now being built by towns, large and small, across the country. Supposedly deployed for public services (police, fire) or where telecom and cable companies don’t offer broadband, these muni-networks most often are the result of clueless politicians yearning to be labeled tech-savvy and hip. Merging dynamic, technology-based business with government, however, is a recipe for disaster.
In addition to the bungled digital TV transition, consider wireline telecom regulation. We’ve just been through another wrenching, bungled transition from what was a quasi-public-private, highly regulated, monopoly wireline telecom environment to a privatized, competitive, highly-regulated one. We correctly realized that the government imposed monopoly in telecom was blocking investment in the new technologies of lasers and chips and the new services that could result. We correctly wanted to move to a deregulated private model, with many new entrants. But in practice, legacy political interests overwhelmed the pure idea of deregulation and produced a telecom crash and set America back vis-a-vis our international competitors.
There is still much to do at the federal and state levels to more fully deregulate and privatize our telecom and spectrum markets. But we are finally making some progress. So why would we now, at this crucial turning point, when communicaitons is finally exiting the failed public realm for the cornucopian private arena, go backward? Backward to more, not less, public involvement in telecom? And not just regulation, which is bad enough, but public ownership of networks competing with the numerous highly regulated, highly taxed private players? Why would we throw one more obstacle in the way of the private players, who are struggling to stay ahead of their many rivals in this dynamic and tricky market?
If this fad becomes a trend and then a widespread practice, I can see many years from now the same bungling and multi-decade transitions away from public projects that were ill-conceived from the start. Among the many good reasons for public entities not to enter the telecom market is that it will be very messy when they inevitably have to get out of the telecom market.
Governments should make good use of the technologies available to them, from military to public safety and services to general productivity enhancements. But the new muni-network fad is more about the vanity of short-sighted, techno-dunce politicians than it is about real public needs. In fact, as we see in the examples from previous eras, government and telecom are like oil and water. I thought we had learned that.
-Bret Swanson