Election Signals Change in Telecom Policy

Plenty of people around the world were gladdened to see the election of Barack Obama as America’s first African-American president. Politics aside, I’m glad because it means fresh winds across the telecom-policy landscape.

The applause had barely died down from Obama’s Grant Park victory speech before speculation arose as to who will take over as FCC chairman after the stultifying four-year run of Kevin Martin. Say what you will about Martin’s center-right political leanings, it is inarguable that his reign in the most important telecom policy job in America offered little in the way of innovation, fresh ideas, or renewed competition. Despite much hoorah about open networks and open devices, Martin’s signature accomplishment, the 700MHz wireless spectrum auction earlier this year, did little to unseat the oligopoly that controls the U.S. mobile and wireless industry.

Now, with former FCC chairmen like Bill Kennard and Reed Hundt advising him, Obama has an open field to mark a real departure in telecom policy, especially as it relates to the slow turning battleship of the big wireless carriers and to increasing competition in consumer and business voice and data services.

Smart money, according to BusinessWeek, is on Blair Levin, chief of staff under Hundt at the FCC from 1993 to 1997 – a time of real change and new direction in the country’s telecom industry. Levin is Obama’s kind of guy: a young, smart, nonpartisan technocrat who is more interested in getting things done than in clinging to outmoded ideologies. (He’s also a Yalie, undergrad and law school, but the Harvard Law School-grad president-elect is likely to overlook such rivalries.)

Obama’s election could also bring Hundt himself out of effective exile. Saying he wanted to hasten the glacial pace of change in the U.S. wireless industry, Hundt helped assemble a group of Silicon Valley investors to create a company, Frontline Wireless, to bid in the 700MHz auction. That plan was scuttled when Frontline failed to come up with the necessary cash to win a bidding position – a collapse that gave rise to all sorts of conspiracy theories.

Hundt’s reappearance on the national stage would be a boon to the industry and consumers, because he’s an influential forward thinker with a track record of shaking up moribund businesses. It would be a boon to journalists like me because he’s a quote machine who is never far from his BlackBerry.