Steve Jobs designed great products. It’s very, very hard to make the case that he created large numbers of jobs in this country.

— Prof. Paul Krugman, New York Times, January 25, 2012

Turns out, not very hard at all.

The App Economy now is responsible for roughly 466,000 jobs in the United States, up from zero in 2007 when the iPhone was introduced.

— Dr. Michael Mandel, TechNet study, February 7, 2012

See our earlier rough estimate of Apple’s employment effects: “Jobs: Steve vs. the Stimulus.”

— Bret Swanson

Genachowski, however, wants overarching control of the new spectrum and, by extension, the mobile broadband ecosystem. The FCC wants the authority to micromanage the newly available radio waves — who can buy it, how much they can buy, how they can use it, what content flows over it, what business models can be employed with it. But this is an arena that is growing wildly fast, where new technologies appear every day, and where experimentation is paramount to see which business models work. Auctions are supposed to be a way to get more spectrum into the marketplace, where lots of companies and entrepreneurs can find the best ways to use it to deliver new communications services. ”Any restrictions” by Congress on the FCC “would be a real mistake,” said Genachowski. In other words, he doesn’t want Congress to restrict his ability to restrict the mobile business. It seems the liberty of regulators to act without restraint is a higher virtue than the liberty of private actors.

At the end of 2011, the FCC and Justice Department vetoed AT&T’s proposed merger with T-Mobile, a deal that would have immediately expanded 3G mobile capacity across the nation and accelerated AT&T’s next generation 4G rollout by several years. That deal was all about a more effective use of spectrum, more cell towers, more capacity to better serve insatiable smart-phone and tablet equipped consumers. Now the FCC is holding hostage the spectrum auction bill with its my-way-or-the-highway approach. And one has to ask: Is the FCC really serious about spectrum, mobile capacity, and a healthy broadband Internet?

— Bret Swanson

Surely, it is neither fair nor logical for the FCC to trumpet a national spectrum crisis for much of the past year, and then draft a report claiming that two major wireless companies face no such constraints despite sworn declarations demonstrating the opposite.

The report is so off-base and one-sided that the FCC may actually have hurt its own case.

On Thanksgiving Eve, the FCC surprised everyone. It hadn’t yet completed its investigation into the proposed AT&T-T-Mobile wireless merger, and the parties had not had a chance to discuss or rebut the agency’s initial findings. Yet the FCC preempted the normal process by announcing it would send the case to an administrative law judge — essentially a vote of no-confidence in the deal. I say “vote,” but  the FCC commissioners hadn’t actually voted on the order.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski called AT&T CEO Randall Stevenson, who, on Thanksgiving Day, had to tell investors he was setting aside $4 billion in case Washington blocked the deal.

The deal is already being scrutinized by the Department of Justice, which sued to block the merger last summer. The fact that telecom mergers and acquisitions must negotiate two levels of federal scrutiny, at DoJ and FCC, is already an extra burden on the Internet industry. But when one agency on this dual-track games the system by trying to influence the other track — maybe because the FCC felt AT&T had a good chance of winning its antitrust case — the obstacles to promising economic activity multiply.

After the FCC’s surprise move, AT&T and T-Mobile withdrew their merger application at the FCC. No sense in preparing for an additional hearing before an administrative law judge when they are already deep in preparation for the antitrust trial early next year. Moreover, the terms of the merger agreement are likely to have changed after the companies (perhaps) negotiate conditions with the DoJ. They’d have to refile an updated application anyway. Not so fast, said the FCC. We’re not going to allow AT&T and T-Mobile to withdraw their application. Or we if we do allow it, we will do so “with prejudice,” meaning the parties can’t refile a revised application at a later date. On Tuesday the FCC relented — the law is clear: an applicant has the right to withdraw an application without consent from the FCC. But the very fact the FCC initially sought to deny the withdrawal is itself highly unusual. Again, more procedural gamesmanship.

If that weren’t enough, the FCC then said it would release its “findings” in the case — another highly unusual (maybe unprecedented) action. The agency hadn’t completed its process, and there had been no vote on the matter. So the FCC instead released what it calls a “staff report” — a highly critical internal opinion that hadn’t been reviewed by the parties nor approved by the commissioners. We’re eager to analyze the substance of this “staff report,” but the fact the FCC felt the need to shove it out the door was itself remarkable.

It appears the FCC is twisting legal procedure any which way to fit its desired outcome, rather than letting the normal merger process play out. Indeed, “twisting legal procedure” may be too kind. It has now thrown law and procedure out the window and is in full public relations mode. These extralegal PR games tilt the playing field against the companies, against investment and innovation, and against the health of the U.S. economy.

— Bret Swanson

So of course the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday declared mobile data roaming (which is a private mobile service) a common carrier. Got it? The law says “shall not.” Three FCC commissioners say, We know better.

This up-is-down determination could allow the FCC to impose price controls on the dynamic broadband mobile Internet industry. Up-is-down legal determinations for the FCC are nothing new. After a decade trying, I’ve still not been able to penetrate the legal realm where “shall not” means “may.” Clearly the FCC operates in some alternate jurisprudential universe.

I do know the decision’s practical effect could be to slow mobile investment and innovation. It takes lots of money and know-how to build the Internet and beam real-time videos from anywhere in the world to an iPad as you sit on your comfy couch or a speeding train. Last year the U.S. invested $489 billion in info-tech, which made up 47% of all non-structure capital expenditures. Two decades ago, info-tech comprised just 33% of U.S. non-structure capital investment. This is a healthy, growing sector.

As I noted a couple weeks ago,

You remember that “roaming” is when service provider A pays provider B for access to B’s network so that A’s customers can get service when they are outside A’s service area, or where it has capacity constraints, or for redundancy. These roaming agreements are numerous and have always been privately negotiated. The system works fine.

But now a group of provider A’s, who may not want to build large amounts of new network capacity to meet rising demand for mobile data, like video, Facebook, Twitter, and app downloads, etc., want the FCC to mandate access to B’s networks at regulated prices. And in this case, the B’s have spent many tens of billions of dollars in spectrum and network equipment to provide fast data services, though even these investments can barely keep up with blazing demand. . . .

It is perhaps not surprising that a small number of service providers who don’t invest as much in high-capacity networks might wish to gain artificially cheap access to the networks of the companies who invest tens of billions of dollars per year in their mobile networks alone. Who doesn’t like lower input prices? Who doesn’t like his competitors to do the heavy lifting and surf in his wake? But the also not surprising result of such a policy could be to reduce the amount that everyone invests in new networks. And this is simply an outcome the technology industry, and the entire country, cannot afford. The FCC itself has said that “broadband is the great infrastructure challenge of the early 21st century.”

But if Washington actually wants more infrastructure investment, it has a funny way of showing it. On Sunday at a Boston conference organized by Free Press, former Obama White House technology advisor Susan Crawford talked about America’s major communications companies.  ”[R]egulating these guys into to an inch of their life is exactly what needs to happen,” she said. You’d think the topic was tobacco or human trafficking rather than the companies that have pretty successfully brought us the wonders of the Internet.

It’s the view of an academic lawyer who has never visited that exotic place called the real world. Does she think that the management, boards, and investors of these companies will continue to fund massive  infrastructure projects in the tens of billions of dollars if Washington dangles them within “an inch of their life”? Investment would dry up long before we ever saw the precipice. This is exactly what’s happened economy-wide over the last few years as every company, every investor, in every industry worried about Washington marching them off the cost cliff. The White House supposedly has a newfound appreciation for the harms of over-regulation and has vowed to rein in the regulators. But in case after case, it continues to toss more regulatory pebbles into the economic river.

Perhaps Nick Schulz of the American Enterprise Institute has it right. Take a look. He calls it the Tommy Boy theory of regulation, and just maybe it explains Washington’s obsession — yes, obsession; when you watch the video, you will note that is the correct word — with managing every nook and cranny of the economy.

We’re nearing 300 million mobile subscribers in the U.S., and Strategy Analytics estimates by 2014 we’ll add an additional 60 million connected devices like tablets, kiosks, remote sensors, medical monitors, and cars. All this means more connectivity, more of the time, for more people. Mobile data traffic on AT&T’s network rocketed 8,000% in the last four years. Remember that just a decade ago there was essentially no wireless data traffic. It was all voice traffic. A few rudimentary text applications existed, but not much more. By year-end 2010, AT&T was carrying around 12 petabytes per month of mobile traffic alone. The company expects another 8 to 10-fold rise over the next five years, when its mobile traffic could reach 150 petabytes per month. (We projected this type of growth in a series of reports and articles over the last decade.)

The two companies’ networks and businesses are so complementary that AT&T thinks it can achieve $40 billion in cost savings. That’s more than the $39-billion deal price. Those huge efficiencies should help keep prices low in a market that already boasts the lowest prices in the world (just $0.04 per voice minute versus, say, $0.16 in Europe).

But those who focus only on the price of existing products (like voice minutes) and traditional metrics of “competition,” like how many national service providers there are, will miss the boat. Pushing voice prices down marginally from already low levels is not the paramount objective. Building fourth generation mobile multimedia networks is. Some wonder whether “consolidation of power could eventually lead to higher prices than consumers would otherwise see.” But “otherwise” assumes a future that isn’t going to happen. T-Mobile doesn’t have the spectrum or financial wherewithal to deploy a full 4G network. So the 4G networks of AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint (in addition to Clearwire and LightSquared) would have been competing against the 3G network of T-Mobile. A 3G network can’t compete on price with a 4G network because it can’t offer the same product. In many markets, inferior products can act as partial substitutes for more costly superior products. But in the digital world, next gen products are so much better and cheaper than the previous versions that older products quickly get left behind. Could T-Mobile have milked its 3G network serving mostly voice customers at bargain basement prices? Perhaps. But we already have a number of low-cost, bare-bones mobile voice providers.

The usual worries from the usual suspects in these merger battles go like this: First, assume a perfect market where all products are commodities, capacity is unlimited yet technology doesn’t change, and competitors are many. Then assume a drastic reduction in the number of competitors with no prospect of new market entrants. Then warn that prices could spike. It’s a story that may resemble some world, but not the one in which we live.

The merger’s boost to cell-site density is hugely important and should not be overlooked. Yes, we will simultaneously be deploying lots of new Wi-Fi nodes and femtocells (little mobile nodes in offices and homes), which help achieve greater coverage and capacity, but we still need more macrocells. AT&T’s acquisition will boost its total number of cell sites by 30%. In major markets like New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, the number of AT&T cell sites will grow by 25%-45%. In many areas, total capacity should double.

It’s not easy to build cell sites. You’ve got to find good locations, get local government approvals, acquire (or lease) the sites, plan the network, build the tower and network base station, connect it to your long-haul network with fiber-optic lines, and of course pay for it. In the last 20 years, the number of U.S. cell sites has grown from 5,000 to more than 250,000, but we still don’t have nearly enough. CEO Randall Stephenson says the T-Mobile purchase will achieve almost immediately a network expansion that would have taken five years through AT&T’s existing organic growth plan. Because of the nature of mobile traffic — i.e., it’s mobile and bandwidth is shared — the combination of the two networks should yield a more-than-linear increase in quality improvements. The increased cell-site density will give traffic planners much more flexibility to deliver high-capacity services than if the two companies operated separately.

The U.S. today has the most competitive mobile market in the world (second, perhaps, only to tiny Hong Kong). Yes, it’s true, even after the merger, the U.S. will still have a more “competitive” market than most. But “competition” is often not the most — or even a very — important metric in these fast moving markets. In periods of undershoot, where a technology is not good enough to meet demand on quantity or quality, you often need integration to optimize the interfaces and the overall experience, a la the hand-in-glove paring of the iPhone’s hardware, software, and network. Streaming a video to a tiny piece of plastic in your pocket moving at 60 miles per hour — with thousands of other devices competing for the same bandwidth — is not a commodity service. It’s very difficult. It requires millions of things across the network to go just right. These services often take heroic efforts and huge sums of capital just to make the systems work at all.

Over time technologies overshoot, markets modularize, and small price differences matter more. Products that seem inferior but which are “good enough” then begin to disrupt state-of-the art offerings. This was what happened to the voice minute market over the last 20 years. Voice-over-IP, which initially was just “good enough,” made voice into a commodity. Competition played a big part, though Moore’s law was the chief driver of falling prices. Now that voice is close to free (though still not good enough on many mobile links) and data is king, we see the need for more integration to meet the new challenges of the multimedia exaflood. It’s a never ending, dynamic cycle. (For much more on this view of technology markets, see Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen).

The merger will have its critics, but it seriously accelerates the coming of fourth generation mobile networks and the spread of broadband across America.

— Bret Swanson

Mobile, perhaps not coincidentally, has also been historically a quite lightly regulated industry. But emerging is a sort of slow boil of small but many rules, or proposed rules, that could threaten the sector’s success. I’m thinking of the “bill shock” proceeding, in which the FCC is looking at billing practices and various “remedies.” And the failure to settle the D block public safety spectrum issue in a timely manner. And now we have a group of  rural mobile providers who want the FCC to set prices in the data roaming market.

You remember that “roaming” is when service provider A pays provider B for access to B’s network so that A’s customers can get service when they are outside A’s service area, or where it has capacity constraints, or for redundancy. These roaming agreements are numerous and have always been privately negotiated. The system works fine.

But now a group of provider A’s, who may not want to build large amounts of new network capacity to meet rising demand for mobile data, like video, Facebook, Twitter, and app downloads, etc., want the FCC to mandate access to B’s networks at regulated prices. And in this case, the B’s have spent many tens of billions of dollars in spectrum and network equipment to provide fast data services, though even these investments can barely keep up with blazing demand.

The FCC has never regulated mobile phone rates, let alone data rates, let alone data roaming rates. And of course mobile voice and data rates have been dropping like rocks. These few rural providers are asking the FCC to step in where it hasn’t before. They are asking the FCC to impose old-time common carrier regulation in a modern competitive market – one in which the FCC has no authority to impose common carrier rules and prices.

In the chart above, we see U.S. info-tech investment in 2010 approached $500 billion. Communications equipment and structures (like cell phone towers) surpassed $105 billion. The fourth generation of mobile networks is just in its infancy. We will need to invest many tens of billions of dollars each year for the foreseeable future both to drive and accommodate Internet innovation, which spreads productivity enhancements and wealth across every sector in the economy.

It is perhaps not surprising that a small number of service providers who don’t invest as much in high-capacity networks might wish to gain artificially cheap access to the networks of the companies who invest tens of billions of dollars per year in their mobile networks alone. Who doesn’t like lower input prices? Who doesn’t like his competitors to do the heavy lifting and surf in his wake? But the also not surprising result of such a policy could be to reduce the amount that everyone invests in new networks. And this is simply an outcome the technology industry, and the entire country, cannot afford. The FCC itself has said that “broadband is the great infrastructure challenge of the early 21st century.”

Economist Michael Mandel has offered a useful analogy:

new regulations [are] like  tossing small pebbles into a stream. Each pebble by itself would have very little effect on the flow of the stream. But throw in enough small pebbles and you can make a very effective dam.

Why does this happen? The answer is that each pebble by itself is harmless. But each pebble, by diverting the water into an ever-smaller area,  creates a ‘negative externality’ that creates more turbulence and slows the water flow.

Similarly, apparently harmless regulations can create negative externalities that add up over time, by forcing companies to spending  time and energy meeting the new requirements. That reduces business flexibility and hurts innovation and growth.

It may be true that none of the proposed new rules for wireless could alone bring down the sector. But keep piling them up, and you can dangerously slow an important economic juggernaut. Price controls for data roaming are a terrible idea.

The very success of smartphones, tablets, and all the new mobile form-factors fuels frustration. They are never fast enough. We always want more capacity, less latency, fewer dropped calls, and ubiquitous access. In a real sense, these are good problems to have. They reflect a fast-growing sector delivering huge value to consumers and businesses. Rapid growth, however, necessarily strains various nodes in the infrastructure. At some point, a lack of resources could stunt this upward spiral. And one of the most crucial resources is wireless spectrum.

There is broad support for opening vast swaths of underutilized airwaves — 300 megahertz (MHz) by 2015 and 500 MHz overall — but we first must dispose of one spectrum scuffle known as the “D block.” Several years ago in a previous spectrum auction, the FCC offered up 10 MHz for commercial use — with the proviso that the owner would have to share the spectrum with public safety users (police, fire, emergency) nationwide. This “D block” sat next to an additional 10 MHz known as Public Safety Broadband (PSB), which was granted outright to the public safety community. But the D block auction failed. Potential bidders could not reconcile the technical and business complexities of this “encumbered” spectrum. The FCC received just one D block bid for just $472 million, far below the FCC’s minimum acceptable bid of $1.3 billion. So today, three years after the failed auction and almost a decade after 9/11, we still have not resolved the public safety spectrum question.

Washington is considering two principal options: (1) redo the previous D block auction with the private-public sharing scheme; or (2) grant the D block to public safety, creating a nationwide contiguous 20 MHz public safety band.

The shared-spectrum scheme was perhaps worth a try the first time ’round. Although many doubted it would succeed, the concept was interesting, and it offered at least theoretical efficiencies — commercial users get most of the bandwidth during public tranquility, first responders get priority in emergency. Plus, it’d be nice to pick up a few billion dollars for the U.S. Treasury. Better than allocating it all (for free) to public safety where much of the bandwidth may lay fallow much of the time, right? Wrong. A failed auction yields no dollars and no usable spectrum.

It turned out the technical complexities of building for two very different purposes — high efficiency for commercial versus highly robust and redundant for public safety — and the likely conflicts of authority and responsibility (inherent in any entity with no true “owner”) posed too great a risk for anyone to bid a serious amount. Many of the technical and ownership risks still apply today.

Why not just award the D block to public safety and get on with the plan to allocate spectrum in amounts many times larger than the D block? Supporters of a re-auction say the government might leave money on the table and deny this particular band to commercial users. True, as far as it goes. Which isn’t very far.

A new paper by the Phoenix Center attempts to analyze this tricky subject from an economic perspective. Phoenix examines the costs and benefits of each option and concludes it is mostly timing of the allocation and the location of the spectrum in the frequency band that count.

allocating the contiguous D Block to public safety only postpones the allocation of an additional 10 MHz for commercial purposes (which the “new” block comes from the 500 MHz of spectrum promised by the FCC and the Obama Administration).  In the second option, the D Block is auctioned for commercial purposes now, precluding its assignment for public safety purposes.  In this case, the incremental benefits and costs from commercial use accrue now, but the benefits and costs of public safety’s use are postponed.  Framed in this way, the relevant issue is not whether the 10 MHz is used for public safety or used for commercial use, but rather when and which 10 MHz is put to use in both, and how the size and timing of benefits compare between these two alternatives.

Although the FCC says a new D block auction would be unencumbered, specific rules have not yet been proposed, and it’s likely some technical and even “open access” rules could accompany the block, thus reducing its market value. Further, in the new wireless broadband networks using LTE technology, contiguous 10 MHz bands are highly desirable. The physical separation of the D block with other commercial bands would mean a likely auction value of between $2-6 billion less than a contiguous 10 MHz block elsewhere. Phoenix estimates the cost of delaying a commercial auction of the D block is around $600 million annually, essentially the consumer surplus of having more spectrum available, which translates into lower prices for mobile services.

On the other hand, a public safety D block would be contiguous with the existing PSB block. This is important because it would substantially reduce the cost of building a public safety network. (It’s easier technically to build a system that covers one contiguous frequency band rather than two bands that are “far apart.” Phoenix estimates network equipment savings for contiguous bands of $4 billion.)

The cost of delaying the public safety network buildout is awfully hard to estimate. Can we get by on what we have now? What if a disaster hits? What is the value of having a real broadband network for combating everyday crime, for the next Katrina? Who knows, but it is likely to be a significantly large number. Leaving this probably significant number aside, however, it’s still easy to see from Phoenix’s estimates that $4 billion > $600 million. That is, once the costs and benefits are added up, the $4 billion in extra capital to build a noncontiguous public safety network is higher than the $0.6 billion in value generated by the commercial network over a five-year window, given all the challenges of this particular block. Any marginal public safety value would just make the gap wider and argue further for a grant to public safety.

If the U.S. weren’t about to open up hundreds of megahertz of much needed new spectrum, the argument may be different. Perhaps then we would have to force commercial and public safety to share a cramped apartment. But because we are opening up lots of new spectrum; because we do have this rare opportunity to give public safety a contiguous band, which should last basically forever; because it should preclude public safety from seeking impositions on commercial spectrum in the future; and because it could pave the way politically for the next huge spectrum expansion, it looks like the smart thing to do.

The fact is, with hundreds of megahertz of new spectrum being unleashed to the commercial world, an unencumbered grant of 10 MHz to the public safety world is probably worth it. Let’s get on with the show.

The Federal Communications Commission recognized these trends and needs in its new National Broadband Plan. It set the bold goal of unleashing 500 MHz of mostly dormant wireless spectrum for more productive use in new broadband Internet and media applications.

On March 29, the FCC had a chance to begin putting its Plan into action when it approved the acquisition of SkyTerra by Harbinger Capital. The result of the merger is a new wireless company that will use both MSS satellite spectrum and so-called ATC terrestrial spectrum to deliver a new hybrid mobile service. Harbinger announced it would build a nationwide, wholesale, “open access” 4G broadband wireless network at the cost of $6 billion. Although not part of the FCC’s 500 MHz push, the new Harbinger strategy aligns nicely with the goal of more, better, and broader wireless access and options throughout the country (in this case, Canada, too).

But the FCC order, which was not voted by the full commission but issued by the bureau chiefs, contains two curious provisions. The provisions restrict Harbinger’s cooperation with two important mobile service providers and could hinder the very goal of extending more wireless coverage to more Americans.

In an attachment to its acquisition approval, the FCC said Harbinger may not lease capacity or otherwise partner with the two largest U.S. mobile phone companies — Verizon and AT&T — without the FCC’s prior permission. The FCC also barred Verizon and AT&T, should any cooperative agreement or lease be allowed, from consuming more than 25% of the bytes carried in any “Economic Area.” Quite baffling, and as far as I know, unprecedented.

The broad effect of these restrictions will be to reduce flexibility and growth in this fast-moving arena, to restrict much needed spectrum in key geographies from the companies that serve more than half of all Americans, and to place an unnecessary obstacle in the way of a wireless upstart seeking to bring more capacity and competition to the mobile world.

Many were already skeptical Harbinger could pull it off, the FCC order notwithstanding. Too expensive, too technically demanding, they say, too much competition, with the existing carriers and the likes of ClearWire. But instead of clearing the way for a small competitor to make a go of it, the FCC is adding burdens to Harbinger’s daunting task.

If you were starting a business, one with very large upfront capital costs, how would you like Washington telling you that your two largest potential customers are off limits? The FCC conditions make Harbinger’s proposed network neither “wholesale” nor “open access.” More like a boutique continental 4G wireless network. Sound good? Didn’t think so.

The FCC order could also effectively bar 176.3 million American mobile phone users (Verizon’s 91.2 million customers, AT&T’s 85.1 million) from taking advantage of this new spectrum. We are always looking for ways to expand robust coverage, whether in dense high-usage cities or in tough-to-serve rural, mountain, and coastal areas. Harbinger’s eclectic strategy is to combine both satellite resources and terrestrial repeaters both to add capacity to major markets and to serve out-of-the-way North America. But a large number of American mobile customers could now be blocked from this unique way to expand coverage.

What’s bizarre about this FCC order is that it so pointedly offends its own strategy, laid out just weeks ago in its major National Broadband Plan. The FCC dedicated lots of time and energy to wireless. “Goal No. 2” of the Plan is:

The United States should lead the world in mobile innovation, with the fastest and most extensive wireless networks of any nation.

Within the large section on Spectrum, the FCC highlighted its priorities under these major headings:

5.2 ENSURING GREATER TRANSPARENCY CONCERNING SPECTRUM ALLOCATION AND UTILIZATION

5.3 EXPAND INCENTIVES AND MECHANISMS TO REALLOCATE OR REPURPOSE SPECTRUM

5.6 EXPAND OPPORTUNITIES FOR INNOVATIVE SPECTRUM ACCESS MODELS

Transparency? Seriously, now. This order, issued by the bureau chiefs and not the Commissioners, gave no opportunity for input by the mobile carriers, who were not even party to the transaction. They were not consulted or even notified. Harbinger, meanwhile, was at the mercy of the FCC staff. You want your acquisition approved? Then these are the conditions you’ll have to swallow. This was a case study in opaque spectrum policy.

Expand incentives to repurpose spectrum and for innovative access models? Talk about contracting incentives to repurpose spectrum and encourage new innovations, such as Harbinger’s unique and speculative satellite-4G hybrid system.

I’m no lawyer, but the FCC conditions seem awfully arbitrary. Policy-making by mere whim. Unaccountable, off the cuff, and blatantly contrary to its own shiny new Broadband strategy.

I doubt these conditions on the Harbinger order can stand. But regardless, let’s hope this episode is not a portent of Broadband policy to come.

— Bret Swanson