WASHINGTON-If the wireless telecom industry has learned one thing in recent years, it is that rules for paging, cellular, specialized mobile radio, personal communications services, mobile satellite, microwave, wireless local loop and private wireless services are not made in a vacuum.
Wireless regulations and legislation-even presidential executive orders-are increasingly shaped, influenced and sometimes flow directly from broad public policy initiatives of the White House and Congress.
To wit:
President Clinton wants to pay for college tax tuition credits, school renovation and other domestic programs with spectrum auction revenue. He didn’t check with the wireless industry before cutting the deal with Congress, though. Now, industry is screaming bloody murder over the Federal Communications Commission’s 2.3 GHz auction proposal.
A dispute over cellular telephones brought the United States and Japan to the brink of trade war a few years ago.
Now the Clinton administration is on the verge of war with the returning Republican-led Congress over claims that trade policy regarding telecommunications and other industrial sectors has been contaminated with influence peddling in the form of legal domestic and possibly illegal foreign campaign contributions to the Democratic National Committee. Clinton also is accused of coddling ruthless foreign leaders who rule over fertile trading soil.
A huge global trade accord known as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was almost upended by a little known policy called pioneer’s preference a year or so back. Congress now wants to kill the program.
Virtually the only common ground in the great budget battle of 1995 between the GOP-led Congress and the Clinton administration was spectrum auctions; that is, the need to expand the authorization to use the novel licensing technique that has raised $20 billion since 1994.
States, too, have seen the light, and are hot to tax wireless carriers up and down and every whichaway to help underwrite local budgets. Local citizens, aided by environmentalists and organized labor, are even more hostile. They want wireless out of their backyard, but not out of their everyday lives. It’s payback time for the Communications Workers of America, generous political donors in the last election.
National security and anti-terrorism policy have come to largely dictate encryption and wiretapping policies. Industry is furious.
Congress and the president believe education and health care can be bettered by linking schools, libraries and hospitals to the Internet, but policymakers seem oblivious to the role of wireless technology and so far have largely cut the wireless segment out of the universal service loop.
The Environmental Protection Agency has supplanted industry in setting new RF radiation safety guidelines with the blessing of the FCC, which is now told by EPA that consumers who get hooked on pocket phones really have no guarantee of safety.
Now state and federal courts-including the highest court in the land-are weighing on dicey telecom issues of the day like auctions, interconnection, Internet content, automated telemarketing and affirmative action.
Indeed, the drive for diversity in wireless telecommunications as espoused in 1993 Democratic legislation was struck a near fatal blow by the Supreme Court’s racial preference-curbing Adarand ruling in 1995.
So it should come as no surprise that wireless policy in 1997 will be linked to the big picture, the big players and the big money. Most issues, though, will pale in comparison to the ruckus that antenna siting, wireless taxation and interconnection will create next year. Wireless bioeffects litigation will likely be one big headache for the industry as industry-funded research sputters along and new bioeffects come to light in overseas research.
To put the entire Washington Wireless Merry-Go-Round in some perspective for 1997, here’s a breakdown of what’s in store in key policymaking venues.
The FCC
Reed Hundt, chairman of the FCC, and commissioners James Quello, Rachelle Chong and Susan Ness will continue to have their hands full with telecom act implementation. Except for Ness, who could become FCC chairwoman in Clinton II, it remains unclear who is staying or leaving in the near future.
Regina Keeney, former chief of the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, was tapped by Clinton to fill the Republican seat vacated by Andrew Barrett last spring but the Senate refused a quickie, rubber-stamp confirmation.
Michele Farquhar, a workhorse and a consensus builder in her first year as head of the Wireless Telecom Bureau, will not get a break in 1997.
Auctions for unserved cellular, the 2.3 GHz band and interactive video data services are scheduled next year. There’ll be more bidding once auction rules are written for 800 MHz SMR, general wireless, narrowband PCS, paging, 220 MHz, location monitoring, local multipoint distribution and digital audio radio services.
Before that happens, the bureau has to decide whether its C-block PCS auction was a success or a bust. Serious allegations have been raised against NextWave Personal Communications Inc., GWI PCS Inc. and PCS 2000 L.P., successful big money spenders in the auction. All three cases are ripe for decision.
Meanwhile, rulings are pending on microwave relocation reform, private wireless refarming, public safety future requirements, commercial wireless roaming and flexibility, and enhanced 911 service.
The commission believes the transition from analog to digital TV systems will open up UHF spectrum for public safety radio communications, which are congested and discomboblated in major urban areas.
The FCC wants to avoid acting on a petition to require wireless phone hearing aid compatibility in hopes industry and the hearing impaired community can work things out. If not, the nation’s 5 million hearing aid wearers can take the FCC to court for violating a new telecom act provision requiring access to telecommunications services by disabled persons.
Wireless resellers are expected to continue pressing for concessions from regulators and legislators, and will likely have the same doors shut in their face.
The FCC could be forced to rewrite interconnection rules, maybe even universal service and access charge rules, too, if it’s not careful. Meet me in St. Louis next month.
As federal regulators continue to craft rules fostering local and long distance competition, numbering issues will become increasingly important for the wireless industry. So will combating barriers to entry, like wireless taxation.
And not to be overlooked among FCC concerns: Congress. FCC Chairman Hundt will be in the lion’s den when oversight hearings begin next year. The bad news is he’ll catch hell for telecom act implementation and for being, well, Reed Hundt. The good news is Republican leaders may spare him by deregulating the agency out of existence.
Congress
Same party control, but new faces in leadership positions. Billy Tauzin (R-La.) takes over as head of the House telecommunications subcommittee, reporting to returning Commerce Committee Chairman Thomas Bliley (R-Va.).
The agenda: telecom act implementation oversight, FCC structural reform, spectrum reform and satellite reform.
Ditto for new Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) and communications subcommittee chairman Conrad Burns (R-Mont.).
Belvin, loyal aide to Commissioner Quello and arguably Hundt’s most fierce critic, will be writing those tersely worded congressional letters to the FCC and inviting Hundt to testify at oversight hearings in her new role as senior communications counsel to the Senate Commerce Committee.
McCain also may probe allegations that Commerce Department trade missions, some intended to open telecom markets, were used to solicit Democratic campaign funds.
Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Governmental Aff
airs Committee and former Watergate counsel, will oversee most of the investigation in that chamber.
Burns will try to pass a deregulatory encryption export bill, setting up a confrontation with the White House. The Clinton administration’s encryption policy is more restrictive and is based on a key escrow mechanism that Burns and many in industry oppose.
Congressional budget writers who’ve usurped spectrum policymaking from telecom lawmakers will try once more to make a balanced budget deal with the White House.
That could mean extending auctions beyond commercial wireless services to private wireless services.
Mark Crosby, president of the Industrial Telecommunications Association, is making the rounds on Capitol Hill and at the FCC to pitch spectrum lease fees for private wireless in lieu of auctions.
The post-election honeymoon between Clinton and the kinder and gentler Gingrichites may extend far beyond Jan. 7, when the 105th Congress convenes, seeing that Clinton-having purged the White House of liberal factions-will present a modular moderate agenda to lawmakers.
Credit goes to the man behind The Man-Dick Morris-who can retire into blissful self introspection and be comforted by the fact that he resurrected and saved Clinton’s presidency, only to ruin his marriage.
The $2 million kiss-and-tell book deal could take some of the hurt away.
The judiciary committees in the House and Senate will continue to monitor the telecom mega-merger trend for antitrust consequences and oversee implementation of the 1994 digital wiretap law that causes ongoing friction between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the wireless industry.
Joel Klein, the Justice Department’s acting antitrust chief who replaced Anne Bingaman, will be watching, too, though perhaps not as closely as his predecessor.
Joe Barton (R-Texas), chairman of the House Commerce subcommittee on oversight and investigations and a senior Commerce committee member, will continue to monitor wireless competition and, if not satisfied, may go another round with wireless carriers and call for switched resale and/or unbundled interconnection.
On the international front, Mike Oxley (R-Ohio)-another ranking Republican on Commerce-will renew his fight to relax foreign ownership restrictions governing wireless and wireline common carriers.
Bliley and others will attempt to restructure the International Mobile Satellite Organization and the International Telecommunications Satellite Organization, multigovernmental consortia with privileges and legal immunities not enjoyed by purely private sector satellite firms.
The State Department, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the FCC have yet to figure out how Comsat Corp., the U.S. signatory to Inmarsat and Intelsat, fits into the picture.
The FCC’s International Bureau, led by Don Gips, must act on more licensing and spectrum issues governing big and little low-earth-orbit satellites.
The imbroglio between Teledesic Corp., the global satellite venture headed by cellular and computer pioneers Craig McCaw and Bill Gates, and Associated Communications L.L.C., the wireless local loop startup headed by former AT&T Corp. president Alex Mandl, has to be resolved as well.
The United States wants to negotiate global accords soon, under the auspices of the World Trade Organization, to remove tariffs on telecom and computer equipment by 2000 and to remove market barriers to telecommunications services.
The courts
In addition to interconnection, potentially every other major piece of telecom act implementation could be litigated next year due to the complexity of the issues involved and the huge sums of money at stake for competing interests.
Auction defaults and PCS license challenges could go to court, too.
The Supreme Court will take up Internet content regulation, an issue not at the wireless forefront today but one that could become more relevant as carriers pass more varieties of digitized information through their networks.
Technologically, digitization is the name of the game in the new millennium. Operationally, convergence will be the calling card. Technical standards are being left to industry and the marketplace.
Trade
The United States will continue to aggressively pursue open markets in telecommunications and to enforce existing trade accords.
The Pacific Rim, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe offer unprecedented opportunities for the nation, owing to its competitive advantage in high tech.
Acting U.S. trade representative Charlene Barshefsky has the right stuff to do the job on a permanent basis. Clinton just needs an O.K. from Senate leadership that they’ll forgive her for Canadian lumber lobbying. The U.S. lumber industry might ask that Clinton and Congress check the law, which counts such lobbying as a disqualifier for USTR.
