The FCC will launch a broad investigation into the nation's wireless companies in an effort to figure out what regulations, if any, will help citizens get faster and cheaper connections for cooler and cooler mobile devices, a newly constituted gang of five commissioners decided Thursday.
The wireless "notice of inquiry" will be broad, ranging from figuring ways to identify which portion of the radio spectrum can be reassigned for use by wireless companies to understanding how the application markets work for smartphones.
The notice comes less than a week after Apple, AT&T and Google had to answer the FCC's questions about how and why Apple rejected Google's innovative Voice App for the iPhone.
That move sent a clear signal to the industry that the FCC's wireless bureau would be watching closely for any signs of anti-competitive behavior in the market -- a far cry from the lumbering pace at which the FCC handled Comcast's blocking of bit torrent on its cable network. In that case the FCC took more than a year to order Comcast to cut it out.
The notice was welcomed by Public Knowledge, a Washington, D.C., public interest group that has been pushing for more regulation of the nation's dominant mobile carriers: AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile.
"The Commission took exactly the right path today when it voted to look at all aspects of competition in the wireless industry," said the group's president Gigi Sohn in a press release. "For too long, the appearance of competition among a few carriers has masked underlying anti-competitive industry practices ranging from consumer contracts to roaming agreements."
Staff will also be preparing a required report to Congress on the state of competition in the wireless market, which came with its own official inquiry.
While the vote to approve the inquires were unanimous, the split between Republicans and Democrats on the committee, now 3-2, remained evident. Republicans sounded warnings about regulations and Democrats spoke of consumer protection -- though both sides spoke in glowing terms of the word "innovation."
"There should be no doubt that facilitating wireless innovation is crucial to the nation's well being," said Commissioner Michael Copps, a returning Democrat, who reminded the committee at the outset that the FCC's core job was to protect consumers.
Copps also said that the wireless world had much to learn "from the internet model, where the freedom to choose devices and applications are good for consumers." That's a none-too subtle telegraphing of his support for extending to the wireless industry the broadband freedom rules, which require ISPs to let you plug in your computer of choice and use whatever web services you like.
But Commissioner Robert McDowell, a Republican re-appointee, countered with arguments that the wireless industry was "robustly competitive."
"The phenomenal success of the wireless sector shows how well a light regulatory touch works," McDowell said, pointing to the billions of dollars being invested by mobile phone companies in their networks, despite a reeling economy.
That sentiment was echoed by fellow Republican, and new appointee, Meredith Baker who suggested the FCC should be mindful to "continue to refrain from unnecessary regulation."
Consumers and interest groups have just 30 days to answer the staff's questions, which will be laid out in an official Notice of Inquiry that will be published on the FCC's website shortly.
That short deadline reflects the FCC's need to understand the complex world of wireless quickly, because it is racing to complete a national broadband plan due to Congress mid-February.
The new head of the FCC, Julius Genachowski, a former law school classmate of President Obama, energetically led the first full hearing of the new commission. But the fresh-faced chairman gave little sense of how he would like to regulate the wireless industry, saying not much more than that mobile broadband will "play an essential role in supporting the long-term health of our economy."
Staff member Blair Levin, who is leading the FCC's effort to write the national broadband plan, was a bit more realistic in his assessment of how that effort was going, which he called the biggest task for the FCC since the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
He noted that the FCC had been flying blind in regards to broadband. "We have had to essentially recreate data that we hoped would exist" Levin said. "This institution did not have the kind of data it needed to have."
He also noted that Congress clearly wants to universalize broadband, but it is likely that demand for grants will outstrip supply -- $7.2 billion was authorized last February.
And, Levin added, if H1N1 flu virus gets bad, the demand will grow even higher as "people commute by broadband" and schools set up ad-hoc video streams from elementary school classrooms to infected children at their homes.
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