What AT&T-Mo tells us about transparency

[Commentary] Sometimes knowing you are observed is enough to make you behave well. That’s why the free press is so valued in the U.S, why we have the Freedom of Information Act and why several states have sunshine laws that allow citizens and the press to hold officials accountable. So there’s a tendency to trumpet the unintentional exposure of information in AT&T’s recent filings with the Federal Communications Commission as the reason the agency is taking a closer look at figures provided by the Nation’s No. 2 carrier about its claims. The agency also restarted the so-called shot clock, which means the agency will try to have a decision in the next 97 days.

Earlier this week, the FCC asked AT&T for more details on its economic models and newspapers and bloggers rushed to ascribe that request for more information to AT&T’s accidental release of information the week before. In the letter, which was subsequently redacted again, AT&T had laid out the economic rationale for a decision to avoid providing LTE for 97 percent of the country, citing a $3.8 billion price tag for going beyond the 80 percent mark. The filing got a flurry of attention as many rightly wondered why AT&T was so reluctant to spend $3.8 billion on a build out when it was willing to spent 10 times that on buying T-Mobile. So did the FCC listen to all the hoopla and realize it needed to ask for more information? God, I hope not. The FCC had all the information in the first place — it’s just the rest of us who weren't privy to AT&T’s machinations around building out an LTE network to rural areas.