D Block Spectrum Auction: Policy Right; Business Wrong

[Commentary] It is really a shame the FCC’s D Block/Public Safety auction didn’t work. But even in the failure, we should be delighted at the enormous policy progress it represents. Morgan O’Brien's Cyren Call plan brought an extraordinary revolution in spectrum policy and emergency communications. Marx would be disappointed because change here was so clearly the work of a handful of individuals, not inexorable economic forces. When law enforcement leader Harlin McEwen recruited safety leaders to support O’Brien’s plan, the FCC adopted and applied many of its key principles to the pre-existing spectrum allocation. In doing so, the Commission basically followed the subsequent plan proposed and lobbied hard by Reed Hundt’s now-defunct Frontline. (There in two sentences is a year’s worth of intensive lobbying by scores of parties!) Morgan and Harlin touched off tectonic shifts in spectrum licensing policy and emergency communications architecture, and the FCC sought to implement them. In a single year there was a huge policy break made from our current balkanized, compartmentalized and non-standardized communications to a modern, national Internet Protocol-based approach. From local everything, look at what happened. Thanks to these folks’ leadership, we have gone from local to national license, from local to national network, from self-owned to managed services, from narrow (and “wideband”) to IP broadband, from siloed access control and identity management to shared core services, from separate systems to sharing commercial spectrum and networks, and from separate technology to sharing in the benefits of commercial R&D. These are all extraordinary and positive developments, whatever happens next in the auction.
http://www.benton.org/node/10319