Regulatory policy goals

Dana Blankenhorn says, “The goal of any regulatory policy should be to encourage economic growth, not to give the government money, not just to make a profit for any particular player.” Maybe some context will make that more accessible… Dana is talking about a proposal by Kleiner Perkins and others to have the FCC turn over some available broadband spectrum to a new company they’ve formed, a wireless internet access provider that proposes to pay the government a cut on a tiered service offering.

After reading a little background I don’t understand how Dana could be so measured and dry in his presentation. This has me jumping up and down screaming, or at least it makes me twitch nervously. What seems to be going on is that a consortium of influential venture capitalists is at once trying to subvert the FCC bandwidth auction process and to implement tiered service offerings over the bandwidth they thus monopolize.

The bandwidth auctions could use a little subverting, but this is exactly in the wrong direction. And these pirates claim they’ll be giving away broadband as part of the offering. Sweet-jeepers-goodness-gracious, oh my, oh my… everybody who thinks 512kbps is broadband raise your hand. (No raised hands visible…)

Okay, I simply disagree with Blankenhorn’s assertion that the goal of regulatory policy should be to assure economic growth. First, the definite article throws me. I think there is perhaps room for multiple goals and one important goal should be to control the rapacious greedballs who can come up with half a billion dollars to invest in that huge sucking apparatus they’ve described.

There are lots of reasonable goals for public service regulations, but the first goal has to be to recognize that these services require government intervention to prevent companies with monopoly power from perverting what should be a commodity market. There’s more to say. I wish everyone wasn’t stretching so far for the brass ring of windfall profits that they’ve lost track of the benefits of government absent the influence of greedballs.

Tom Evslin explores the limitations of freedom inherent in the M2Z proposal, comparing it to the Chinese internet.

Thanks to Doc for the link to Dana.