Now that the vow of silence rules in the Federal Communications Commission's 700MHz auction have lifted, the big players in the sale are posting their battle stories—tales of winnings, heroic strategies, and plans for future glory. Braggers include Google, Verizon, AT&T, and Qualcomm.

Google: We won by not winning 

"Partly as a result of our bidding, consumers soon should have new freedom to get the most out of their mobile phones and other wireless devices," two Google attorneys crowed on the search engine giant's official blog yesterday. The company did not win any spectrum in the auction, but Google's real goal, as most observers suspected and was disclosed Richard Whitt and Joseph Faber, was to keep the competition going until the auction's C-block reached the FCC's minimal reserve price: $4.6 billion. The C-block, of course, represented Google's Holy Grail in the auction, with its regs requiring the spectrum owner to open the zone to any and all applications. More

The Great War between the cable and telco tribes opened a new front today as Verizon asked the Federal Communications Commission for rules that will streamline a customer switch from cable to fiber optic television. In its 14-page Request for a Declaratory Ruling, Verizon asked the FCC to end the "sharp disparity in the way competing providers manage customer changes for telephone service as opposed to video services."

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Fox Television has informed the Federal Communications Commission that it will not pay the agency's proposed $91,000 fine for a pixelated strip show on Married in America, broadcast in 2003. "FOX believes that the FCC's decision in this case was arbitrary and capricious, inconsistent with precedent, and patently unconstitutional," the network declared in a press release.

But the media company's detailed, 49-page Petition for Reconsideration, submitted to the agency at the same time, goes far beyond the terse press release. It all but wonders if the FCC's indecency analysts are projecting their own sexual fantasies into the programming that they evaluate. And the Petition sets the stage for yet another legal confrontation as the Supreme Court prepares to hear the FCC's appeal on its "fleeting expletive" rulings, struck down by a lower court in New York City.

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Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick pleaded not guilty today to civil charges that he lied under oath about an affair and spent taxpayer funds to conceal the relationship with his staff member, Christine Beatty. The counts against him all add up to an absurd 90 years in prison. I have no way of knowing whether Mr. Kilpatrick is innocent or guilty of the charges that he faces. But I'll say this about the man, a couple of years ago he stood up to AT&T.

When AT&T first proposed merging with BellSouth, a union that would create an entity controlling half the land lines in the United States, most minority advocates supported the merger. 

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The nation's biggest radio station owner has asked the Federal Communications Commission to force a merged XM/Sirius satellite radio company to obey the agency's indecency laws as a condition for union. "One of the primary potential dangers to free, over-the-air radio posed by this merger is siphoning popular, including 'edgy' content, with consequent loss of advertising revenue," Clear Channel wrote to the FCC on March 11th. "That potential harm is mitigated if broadcast decency rules were to apply to the merged entity. There is no constitutional bar to such a condition."

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Verizon Wireless and AT&T won big in the Federal Communications Commission's now-concluded 700MHz auction, which raised a grand total of $19.592 billion for the government. Google failed to purchase any spectrum, but is probably not at all upset given that the open access conditions it wanted will apply. Verizon successfully bid on six big regional licenses on the auction's so-called Block C, one of which cost the company over $1.6 billion. This will give Verizon broadband reach across the continental United States and Hawaii.; the cell phone giant's press release says the six big bids it won will reach 298 million Americans, and 102 licenses it bought in smaller markets can potentially cover 171 million.

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The man who spoke for Comcast at Harvard last month has told the Federal Communications Commission that the agency has no legal power to stop the cable giant from engaging in what it calls "network management practices" (critics call it peer-to-peer traffic blocking). Comcast vice president David L. Cohen's latest filing with the Commission claims that regulators can do nothing even if they conclude that Comcast's behavior runs afoul of the FCC's Internet neutrality guidelines.

"The congressional policy and agency practice of relying on the marketplace instead of regulation to maximize consumer welfare has been proven by experience (including the Comcast customer experience) to be enormously successful," concludes Cohen's thinly-veiled warning to the FCC, filed on March 11. "Bearing these facts in mind should obviate the need for the Commission to test its legal authority."

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