| tax incentives are a terrible idea... The standard approach for years has been to provide "incentives" to the incumbents in the hopes that they will be moved to extend build out. It hasn't worked. We have seen diminishing competition, consolidation, stock buyback programs and dividend increases. Coverage has largely stagnated.
We need spectrum reform and we need policies that have nothing to do with throwing more money at the incumbents, but instead are focused on increasing competition: Divestiture, moving forward on white space and on the m2z proposal. If any of the bigger players is going to get any love it should be focused on clearwire, on wireless and getting another major player to shake up the market.
We don't need one approach, we need to facilitate many of the alternatives that have been put forward. Policies need to be results based and not based on some purist political and economic ideology. Policies also need to have clearly defined, concrete build out targets and they need to have real teeth and punishments for failure.
If there are any incentives that focus on the incumbents they need to be punitive and not carrots designed to promote warm fuzzy feelings. The incumbents will bitch and moan about the need for "flexibility". There is a long history that shows flexibility means being given loopholes to weasel out of commitments.
I would hope that the people obama surrounds himself with have enough integrity to be willing to see that directing action toward the incumbents is the wrong way to go. These policies have been a failure. They came to power promising real change of direction. Now is the time to put substance behind the words. |
