It’s rather remarkable, really, how willing federal bureaucrats are to block business deals that they speculate will cause price hikes and yet give nary a thought to foisting more than a trillion dollars annually in regulatory costs on the public. That’s one takeaway from the news that AT&T has scrapped its proposed $39 billion acquisition of struggling T-Mobile USA (from Deutsche Telekom AG) after a bruising nine-month battle with the U.S. Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission. Bureaucrats at both agencies concluded that the deal could (maybe, perhaps) hurt …
What’s wrong with this picture? Last night, President Obama told Congress that the nation desperately needs to spend more on infrastructure in order to create jobs and to get the economy moving again. But only last month, his regulators aggressively moved to thwart private-sector plans to invest tens of billions on new infrastructure and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs. The issue is AT&T and its plan to acquire T-Mobile (now a subsidiary of the German telephone company Deutsche Telekom). The wireless industry has been one the most dazzling …
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has set its regulatory sights on wireless telephone providers for instigating a supposed epidemic of “bill shock” across the land. But a review of complaints to the agency, as well as government survey data, casts considerable doubt on the agency’s claim that consumers are terrorized by their mobile phone charges. As illustrated in the accompanying graph, complaints to the FCC related to billing and rates for wireless telephone service accounted for a mere 3 percent of complaints overall in 2009—a significant decline from 17 percent …
Americans are increasingly cutting the cord on their phones. By the most recent estimates, 40 percent Americans rely primarily on their wireless phone for voice calls, and most of those don’t have a wireline phone at all. But don’t count me in that number. It’s not that I wouldn’t like to cut the cord. It’s that I can’t. I live in a cellular hole, one of those thousands of places where wireless connections are weak or non-existent. The reason isn’t geography—I live in a well-developed part of the Washington metro …
In the latest salvo in the war against wireless, media activist group Free Press last week proclaimed that “carriers are using…inflated early termination fees to lock millions into long-term contacts — and customers want out.” It then urged for the FCC to intervene to stop the practice. This would be a mistake. There are plenty of reasons why termination fees make sense for consumers. More importantly, consumers who don’t like them have plenty of choices. In fact, only days after the folks at Free Press released their statement, Internet giant …
Don’t look now, but the FCC is back in business. For some nine months the Federal Communications Commission had been operating with no permanent chairman, and with 3 of its 5 commissioner seats vacant. Now, with the confirmation of new chairman Julius Genachowski, and new commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Meredith Attwell Baker, the agency is locked, loaded, and ready to go. It’s first target? Not broadcasters, despite talk of a revived Fairness Doctrine, or Internet providers, despite talk of “net neutrality” regulation. Their turn may come soon, but first up …
