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Townhall
The FCC’s
“Hotel California” Moment
Mytheos Holt
Dec 04, 2015
The Federal Communications Commission, like most Federal agencies, has
gotten worse at its job under Barack Obama. So much worse, in fact,
that Republican Senators have had to send a letter to them asking if
they’ve even acted on half a million consumer complaints. Even the
worst tech support line in the world would regard that sort of figure
with horror.
Yet, for those paying attention to the tech world, the FCC could also
be poised on the brink of a massive power grab over one of the most
significant areas of Americans’ lives in the present day: the future of
wireless internet itself.
Specifically, the FCC may very well be invoked as a regulatory agency
to handle the emerging fight over the new “LTE-U” technology. Without
boring readers with too many details, LTE-U is a form of technology
being developed by companies who claim it will ––give their customers
much faster internet connections. This shouldn’t be a problem, except
skeptics claim that the way it does this is by cutting everyone who’s
not a customer of one of those companies off from the internet
altogether.
Needless to say, the potential for this kind of anticompetitive
behavior has provoked a high stakes fight. Companies like Google and
Comcast on the skeptics’ side are vying with equally powerful entities
like AT&T, and T-Mobile on the pro-LTE-U side. With that much money
and market share in the mix, Washington was bound to get involved
eventually.
Now it has. As POLITICO notes, the two sides were recently invited to
hash their differences out in front of a closed door session of
Congress for the second time since the fight began. It seems to have
gone about as well as you’d expect. Which is to say that the supporters
of LTE-U at least agreed to get their technology tested, but now the
fight has simply shifted to being over who should do the testing...
Read the rest of the article at Townhall
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