FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell hopes for a briefing soon from c...
FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell hopes for a briefing soon from commission staff on proposals to shift TV spectrum to use for mobile broadband, he said at a conference Thursday on economist Ronald Coase’s legacy on communications policy at George…
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Mason University. “I think all ideas should be on the table,” he said. “I'm not going to rule out or rule in any ideas yet,” McDowell replied to a question about how the change could be carried out. “Certainly the 50th anniversary of the Coase paper is very relevant and timely,” he said. In the paper, “The Federal Communications Commission,” Coase argued for a market-based framework for spectrum allocation. But the U.S. probably won’t move to liberalize spectrum allocations as fast as some others, said Thomas Hazlett, a law professor at the university who has argued for clearing broadcasters from the TV band. “I think our chances are not high to step ahead of the crowd,” he said. Meanwhile, the progressive policies that Coase argued against in his 1959 paper are back at the fore of American politics, said Jeffery Eisanach, the chairman of Empiris economics consulting. “I don’t think the short-term prospects are good for moving in a direction that Coase would like,” he said. It’s easy to envision rhetoric like that about health care and the public option being used about wireless telecommunications if a large block of spectrum becomes available, he said. “Just substitute ‘health care’ and ‘insurance’ with ’telecom’ and ‘network operator,'” he said.