Congress seems to be catching up with industry regarding how spectrum auctions have been manipulated to solve federal budget shortfalls. The House has signaled the Senate that putting arbitrary deadlines on when certain spectrum should be sold is, in essence, stupid, which it is because it does not factor issues other than potential revenue to be gained.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration is hinting at delaying the now-mandatory September 2002 deadline for the auction of 3G spectrum. Another wise move considering no one is sure what spectrum will be auctioned.
Finally, on another auction front this week, the Federal Communications Commission postponed for the 600th time the auction of spectrum at 700 MHz. Again, this is good news because no one expected to bid in this auction would have known exactly when they could hope to receive this spectrum from the TV broadcasters and there hasn’t been a lot of study on how the spectrum could be used.
These auction detours have me wondering about the subtleties surrounding the auctions themselves. While industry and government fight over big-picture items, they are forgetting one crucial factor in how auctions have fared in their history: More emphasis should be put on naming the auctions.
A waste of time, you say? Consider the short history of U.S. spectrum auctions:
The A- and B-block auctions were conducted in the infancy of the government getting into the spectrum-selling business, and yet, the auctions were successful-The A- and B-block auctions got good grades, As if not Bs.
Then came the C-block auction, more commonly called the DE auction, which supposedly stood for designated entities. In reality, it stood for DE-bacle, DE-fault and DE-lay, because the licenses weren’t awarded for many moons after the auction was over. In short, it was a DE-saster.
In keeping with my “name’ theory, the best this auction could have hoped for was a C, an average letter grade. However, you may remember the C-block auction was paired with the F-block auction (and no auction should be named F. Enough said.)
The RE-auction of the C- and F-block auctions looked successful enough, but now it appears it was just a RE-gurgitation of the original DE auction.
I am concerned about the 700 MHz auction. Will it be delayed 700 times? Will broadcasters give up the frequencies in 700 years?
And the 3G auction also contains some hieroglyphics we will not understand until it is too late. The FCC therefore should immediately rename this auction the “GeeWiz people are going to like these new services and be willing to pay enormous amounts of money for them” auction. How about it, Chairman Powell?
