Activists Resist D-Block Plan by Net Neutrality’s Author

Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, strongly hopes Google won a C-block license in the FCC auction that’s winding down, she said. “I don’t think you did, but I hope you won,” she said. “We need a new option” other than telco and cable broadband, Sohn added. Google General Counsel Kent Walker, moderator of the Saturday session of the Legal Futures conference at Stanford Law School sponsored by his company, said he had no idea.

“Convince the FCC that it’s in the public interest to turn the D block into a commons, or half the D block,” Wu proposed. Public safety is a separate aim from public wireless broadband and should “build its own network with government money,” not maintain the “illusion” of piggybacking on a network someone else financed and built, he said.

Public safety already has “tons of spectrum,” Wu said. What it needs rather than the “waste” of giving it more, in the 700 MHz band, is the public funding it needs for a network, he said. For purely political reasons, a “weird” proposed public-private partnership has linked public safety to the D block, Wu said. Asked by an onlooker what incentive carriers would have to buy and build out networks in a commons framework without exclusive rights, he said, “you just open up and see what happens,” as in the 2.5 GHz. “It’s called a market,” Wu said.

But panelists Sohn and Kevin Werbach said it would be unworkable politically to try to get rid of public-safety rights to the spectrum when the FCC sets new rules for doling it out. Chairman Kevin Martin said Friday at the conference that he’s an optimist by nature, but with bids on the D block under the reserve after 179 auction rounds, the agency has to reconsider the rules for a possible new sale effort.

“We're talking about a political campaign here,” said Werbach, once a new-technology policy counsel at the FCC, now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school. He advocated a detailed survey to show who uses what spectrum for which purposes, plus experimental licenses and National Science Foundation grants, to promote open wireless broadband uses. Hitching public-safety interests into the 700 band is “like the way we got the federal highway system built,” he said.

“If you think it’s hard fighting the wireless microphone industry” over opening the broadcast white spaces to broadband devices, “try fighting your police and fire department,” Werbach said. “We'll not only lose this, we'll lose a lot more.” Emergency uses can co-exist with public uses through prioritization of data packets, he said. Sohn agreed. “Maybe it’s not what we want, but it’s 90 percent of what we want,” she said. Exclusive licensing isn’t mandatory and has been made unnecessary by advanced technology, Sohn added. Werbach prefers unlicensed spectrum to licensed frequencies that “open up as a public park,” but the lesser result “could catalyze things,” he said.

Wu dismissed the arguments for D-block compromise as dead ends. He compared them to trying to open the door to making marijuana legal by pushing for medical pot.

To move things along, unlicensed users should start occupying unused spectrum for wireless broadband, Wu said: “You gotta start somewhere, and it always starts with law- breaking.” Wu was responding to Fred von Lohmann, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Von Lohmann had speculated from the floor that unlike its efforts to go after pirate radio stations, the FCC couldn’t shut down large-scale efforts to use spectrum. “That does not work with hundreds, thousands, of people,” he said.

“What’s the FCC gonna do? Roll vans” to chase down so many users? von Lohmann asked, voicing his discomfort at seeming to sound like a “crypto-libertarian” who believes that technology solves its own policy problems without government control. But programmable radios, open-source software and Google’s Android mobile operating system seem to offer an uncontrollable open-access solution, von Lohmann said. - Louis Trager