Monday, December 15, 2008

Politics 101

Dave Rusin is CEO of AFS, a fiber network company based in Atlanta. He writes a post about the spectrum auction politics. Kleiner Perkins is a VC that backed Frontline and M2Z in their bids to get AWS-3 spectrum really cheap. How? By putting conditions on it, like some of the spectrum has to be used for nationwide free filtered Internet.

"My advice to CLECs: stop lobbying Congress and the FCC — they don’t give a rat’s ass about what is best for America. Sure they will meet with you and your highly paid lawyers to act interested, but unless you are driving party politics by stature and cash, you are nothing."

Of course, those of us that were lobbying DC in 2005 are well aware that the cards are stacked against you. At the time, a guy from COMPTEL said it straight: The CLEC Industry has spent millions of dollars with hundreds of lawyers to lose every battle. It goes back to the definition of insanity: if you keep doing the same thing and expect a different result...

Dave adds some more political advice here.

Congress issued a report about the workings of the current FCC. Not good: "The Chairman’s office appears to have ignored evidence that rate payers have been over charged, while the companies providing Telecommunications Relay service has been over compensated, potentially by as much as $100 million per year...... Chairman Martin manipulated report findings and policy direction ... when he ordered that a report to Congress previously issued by the Commission be rewritten with a completely different outcome .... There is a climate of fear and intimidation at the FCC."

Spend money building infrastructure and gaining customers - get DEEP not Wide.

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