White House Take on Spectrum Said Evolving; Leadership Positions Unfilled

Grace Koh has been at the White House since February as special assistant to the president for technology, telecom and cybersecurity policy. Trump hasn't appointed a director to the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which had a key role in telecom and internet policy under President Barack Obama. Industry officials said under Trump, it seems most likely that the National Economic Council, where Koh works, and not OSTP will drive policy. The administration has been staffing OSTP mainly with detailees from elsewhere in government, former government officials said. On telecom, Winter Casey was detailed from NTIA's Office of Policy Analysis and Development to OSTP.

The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology drove the spectrum sharing push under Obama (see 1205290085), but PCAST has been dormant under Trump. Republicans said the PCAST is likely to go away completely since it was seen by conservatives as a salve to high-tech interests that were an important component of the Obama coalition. The White House, NTIA and the FCC didn’t comment Friday.

NTIA has been without even an acting administrator since the start of the administration, though David Redl was nominated as administrator and is expected to be at the agency relatively soon, providing political leadership (see 1706080046). Questions remain whether Redl’s confirmation will get caught up in the broader fight over nominations, particularly that of Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel as a member of the FCC. Redl “will be very important to this conversation” on spectrum issues, said a former top NTIA official. Redl was careful in his testimony Thursday to stress he wants to balance the need for more commercial spectrum with the needs of the agencies, the former official said: “Everyone always says they want exclusive and then you to [get to] NTIA and you realize it’s a lot harder” to achieve.

“The FCC has an advantage over many groups in the Trump administration because it already had two sitting Republican commissioners who are capable and who had thought through what the agency should do to allow markets to work,” said Mark Jamison, University of Florida professor and a member of the Trump FCC transition landing team. “This allowed the FCC to begin a new, well considered direction on Day One. Also, these commissioners have shown unusual skill in staying focused on the job at hand despite intensive personal attacks and drama from opposition groups.”

Putting more spectrum in private hands is critical, Jamison said. “Private license holders will need unprecedented flexibility to change spectrum uses and to develop markets for addressing interference issues, as well as transferring rights to others through sharing, leasing and other arrangements,” he said. “Any sharing arrangement with government agencies that limits these business options will necessarily limit development. That isn’t to say that government should simply abandon radio spectrum that it needs. Rather, it means that any sharing that occurs between business and government should allow as much business flexibility as is practicable.”

Other observers agreed sharing will be part of the equation under Trump.

“Spectrum policy is nonpartisan, and I do expect that, given the cable and tech industries’ interest in spectrum sharing, that sharing will still be a pretty high priority,” said Gigi Sohn, an aide to ex-FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. “I expect a lot of the spectrum policy focus to be on getting more government-controlled spectrum into broader commercial use on an exclusive and non-exclusive basis.”

The White House take on spectrum policy “is sort of a black box,” said Phillip Berenbroick, senior policy counsel at Public Knowledge. Over the past several years, carriers, cable operators, tech companies and the public interest community have coalesced around the idea that “there’s got to be a balance of spectrum uses,” from exclusive use to unlicensed, he said. “You want to leverage the emerging technologies for sharing,” he said. “Without taking advantage of sharing, you’re simply leaving a lot of spectrum on the table,” Berenbroick said. “I hope that consensus continues at the White House, too, since that’s where folks on the Hill are and where folks at the FCC have been recently.”

“Spectrum sharing can facilitate more intensive spectrum use in federal bands, but it’s unlikely that the Trump administration would attempt to make it the default option in the same way as the PCAST report,” said Fred Campbell, director of Tech Knowledge. “I expect the Trump administration will approach commercial spectrum use of federal bands on a case-by-case basis like most previous administrations."

High-level direction is important, but when it comes to federal spectrum, only so much movement can be expected from executive orders and other directives, said Doug Brake, senior telecom policy analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. “With PCAST and 3.5 GHz, there was a lot of momentum throughout the administration and the spectrum was relatively low hanging fruit,” Brake said. “When control over the spectrum is often lower in an agency, or a relatively small, early component of a procurement process, announcing a shift in focus toward exclusive licensing over more complex sharing schemes, without more, is unlikely to be effective.”