Mission accomplished

You’d think leaders of this habitually war-beaten country would have neither the time nor luxury to ingratiate themselves in the kind of palace intrigue over mobile-phone licensing. But sure enough, there’s suddenly uncertainty over an Iraqi cellular licensing policy that supposedly was shored up just weeks ago after years of delay.
Sources close to the situation say Iraq has changed course again, this time deciding to discard a plan that would have scrapped the wireless auction in favor of an arrangement whereby the three national mobile phone operators-Orascom Telecom Iraq Corp., Asia Cell Telecommunications Co. Ltd. and Atheer Telecom Iraq Ltd.-keep their licenses in exchange for one-time payments of $250 million each and an agreement to share 18% of revenues with the government.
Iraq’s Council of Ministers, according to one source, voted 27-7 to nix that plan and conduct an auction as originally planned.
What happened? One theory is Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki now wants the government to auction wireless licenses in hopes he and Massoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party, can score one of the four national cellular licenses that would be auctioned. The mobile-phone business is booming in post-Saddam Iraq, with nearly 10 million GSM subscribers, most of whom are prepaid. Even if true, it’s not necessarily a done deal. There supposedly are a number of high-powered Iraqi political figures who still oppose the auction.
Who knows what’s really up? Getting a fix on the facts is difficult because of the fluid nature of events and warring agendas; the cellular licensing process in Iraq is a snapshot microcosm of the country as a whole.
Apart from what the latest turn of events hold for wireless carriers, vendors and investors in Iraq is the unfortunate marginalization of the Communications and Media Commission. The independent telecom regulator received significant assistance from a Bush administration that saw the potential for a Baghdad-based Federal Communications Commission of sorts. In a sense, when you consider the wackiness leading up to last year’s AWS auction, the unsettled state of the upcoming 700 MHz auction, unfinished universal service reform and other politically charged matters, maybe we succeeded after all.