Cyber politics

The political scene in Washington is antithetical to the core values that drive our success in the international marketplace and risks converting entrepreneurs into statist businessmen,” he warned. “The collectivist notion that drives policy making in Washington is the irrevocable enemy of high-technology capitalism and the wealth creation process.”

Alas, no one listened. Indeed, Rodgers’s dystopian vision of a highly politicized digital future has taken just a decade to become reality. The high-tech policy scene within the Beltway has become a cesspool of backstabbing politics, hypocritical policy positions, shameful PR tactics, and bloated lobbying budgets.

Perhaps we shouldn’t find it surprising that so many players in the tech policy arena now look to throw each other under the Big Government bus to gain marketplace advantages.

After all, that’s the story of many other industries that got under the covers with Washington. But the sheer rapidity with which this sorry state of affairs has unfolded in the tech policy world is shocking, even to the most jaded among us.

• In recent years, telecommunrsications and cable companies both asked the FCC to intervene to harm the other in the” — skirmishes involving marketing efforts to capture or retain consumers. Many years earlier, both sides advocated “open access” mandates be applied to each other’s networks while insisting there was no reason such regulations needed to cover their own systems.

• But those physical infrastructure guys have kissed and made up as part of their unified effort to get the FCC to help them extract better contractual terms from the content creators and broadcasters for their video content. In the battle over “,” cable, satellite, and Telco video distributors have made an unholy alliance with traditional regulatory advocates like Public Knowledge and New America Foundation, asking the FCC to intervene in contractual disputes about program carriage and pricing. Rather than focusing on dismantling the many other legal privileges granted to broadcasters and programmers, video distributors and regulatory advocates would instead essentially force broadcasters and content owners to cut deals they might not find acceptable.

• But the broadcasters don’t exactly have clean hands, either. They pulled out all the stops in an attempt to block their struggling satellite radio industry competitors (Sirius and XM) from merging. They’d previously begged Congress and the FCC to block those satellite operators from offering competing local programming — an exercise in naked protectionism. Recently, broadcasters have asked lawmakers to mandate that all cell phones and mobile devices include FM radio tuners. Broadcasters argue this should be required for “public safety” purposes, but it’s really just an attempt to hold on to fleeing audiences, even if there is little demand for such tuners or the added cost such a mandate would entail for consumers. And then there’s the broadcast industry’s long-standing love affair with “must-carry” mandates, which abridge the property rights of video distributors by forcing pay TV providers to carry channels they might not want (and which the public probably doesn’t demand).

• But broadcasters stand firm on their own property rights. The spectrum they’ve occupied for decades may be worth up to a trillion dollars, and they obviously don’t want anyone else getting their paws on it. But the wireless industry covets thy neighbor’s wife, or at least the spectrum that is hers. It wants the FCC to pressure — or even force — broadcasters to vacate their spectrum so it can be re-auctioned for other purposes, especially wireless broadband.

 Lema Baraka(42592)