Time Running Out for Congress to Approve Incentive Auctions, McDowell Says
FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell warned that time is running short for Congress to authorize the commission to hold voluntary incentive auctions of broadcast spectrum. McDowell, speaking on C-SPAN’s The Communicators, said a mechanism must be created to make auctions “fair and voluntary” for broadcasters.
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"We haven’t seen a lot of action in Congress on this yet,” McDowell said. “The number of legislative days for this year is quickly dwindling down, and this Congress is consumed with the budget, government shutdowns and other such things, the war in Libya and all the rest.” Action is still possible, he said: “I'm not saying it won’t happen this year, but we're starting to run out of time.”
Election-year politics shouldn’t affect the FCC, but they sometimes do, McDowell conceded. “Sometimes different chairmen have been reluctant to tee up items for a vote in an election year that might be considered controversial,” he said. “One has to ask how many votes does that actually affect what we do, how many voters are actually going to the polls to only vote on an FCC issue. Probably not very many. … That’s our job to make tough decisions when they are delivered to us and when it’s appropriate for us to act. That should be in the odd-numbered years as well as in even-numbered years."
McDowell declined to comment on issues of substance raised by AT&T’s proposed purchase of T-Mobile. “If you look at some other recent big mergers in the past few years, they take anywhere from a year to a year and a half, functionally speaking, at the FCC,” he said. “I would look for that same sort of time frame. We have been told by the parties that we should expect an application to be filed at the FCC soon, within the next week or two and then the clock starts ticking.” McDowell also expects Congress to take a close look. “It will be heavily scrutinized,” he said.
McDowell was asked to respond to comments by Commissioner Michael Copps last week that he sees merit in imposing tough merger conditions (CD April 1 p2). The public interest standard, which the FCC uses to examine mergers, is “broad” and “amorphous,” McDowell said. “When you look at … wireless you do have to look at it market by market,” he said. “I hope we can give it a full and fair airing and do it as quickly as possible.”
If regulators find that the merger would harm competition, conditions should be “narrowly tailored” to prevent the damage, he said. “The merger process should not be an excuse to implement rulemakings on issues that don’t arise because of that particular merger,” he said. McDowell said he fully supports recent comments by Commissioner Meredith Baker on the FCC’s merger policy (CD March 3 p2).
McDowell was monitoring a House vote Friday overturning the commission’s net neutrality rules. “There is nothing broken in this space,” he said. “I had a very long dissent back in December on this issue. … If this is going to be a public policy issue, it really should be addressed at the congressional level.”
McDowell compared net neutrality to an FCC order approved Thursday mandating data roaming, which he also dissented from. “You may like an outcome, but you have to respect the process, that’s why it’s there,” he said. “We can’t exceed our authority even if it’s a good idea.” There’s a thread among many complaints filed at the FCC, he said. “The most common request we actually get at the FCC, when you boil it all down, is ‘Please regulate my rival,'” McDowell said. “I think that’s what’s going in net neutrality and a number of things that we see.”
McDowell said he’s not concerned that the FCC would have only four commissioners, if Copps leaves at the end of this Congress without an immediate replacement. About one-third of the time the FCC doesn’t have the usual five members, he noted. “It still manages to vote on some big, controversial issues.”