Michael Weinberg over at Public Knowledge points out that several awful amendments are being shoveled into the upcoming Payroll Tax bill that could significantly impact wireless broadband. The FCC's current network neutrality rules (at Google and Verizon request), don't really cover net neutrality, and one amendment by Representative Marsha Blackburn would ensure neutrality rules could never be applied to wireless. Another, pushed by AT&T, aims at preventing the FCC from trying to ensure smaller competitors get easier access to spectrum while preventing anti-competitive incumbent spectrum squatting.
A third, notes Weinberg, takes aim at White Space broadband, in what's only the latest in a series of incumbent efforts to crush this technology before it gets off the ground and threatens their finances:
One of the greatest boons of the transition from analog to digital TV broadcasting was supposed to be the creation of unlicensed whitespaces or super-wifi. This new spectrum which is much better at communicating long distances and through walls than current wifi spectrum would be used cooperatively by everyone and usher in a new era of wireless devices. However, a third amendment would destroy the FCC s power to allocate some of this great spectrum for unlicensed uses. That means that opportunity would simply pass us by.
It's somewhat obvious that all three are the brain children of incumbent telcos eager to prohibit any effort to instill greater competition in the wireless market while further weakening the FCC's ability to actually regulate. On a related note, Rep. Thomas Marino is pushing a bill that hopes to "end the practice of including more than one subject in a single bill by requiring that each bill enacted by Congress be limited to only one subject." Ironically, "and for other purposes" is tacked on to the end of that bill's description.read comment(s)