Tech at Night: Net Neutrality nears, CWA angry at Obama, 4G competition delayed, Blackburn leads

Tech at Night

The FCC continues to stall national 4G wireless competition in America, as LightSquared continues to be stalled even after having to give up half its spectrum!

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Meanwhile the Net Neutrality power grab creeps closer to being official, at which time MetroPCS and Verizon will sue. I expect them to win and get the regulations tossed out, too, because the last time the FCC tried this, Comcast sued and won.

At least some good things are going on. Marsha Blackburn will show everyone how it’s done and seek ways to address privacy issues without threatening innovation and the free market. There are good reasons she’s Tech at Night’s favorite member of Congress, and why she ought to head up Energy and Commerce, or at least a subcommittee, someday.

The FCC is at least doing something to deal with the spectrum crunch though, with a white space database plan. White spaces are the gaps in allocated spectrum that are currently unused, I believe primarily squeezed between allocated blocks. As technology has improved, we’ve found ways to use those gaps, but as always, government has lagged behind the innovative free market. White space use won’t fix our need to allocate more wireless Internet spectrum, but it has use.

Investment is important to our continuing technological growth, which drives economic growth, so I welcome giving visas to investors who seek to invest in America, through the EB-5 program.

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Eric Schmidt, Google Chairman, contradicted CEO Larry Page and claimed Google isn’t after Motorola Mobility for the patents. Google has also long claimed its patents are “defensive” in nature. Well how defensive are the patents Motorola is already suing Apple over? Apple is, of course, a major competitor of Google’s in the phone business.

I’ll say this for Google though: It took them time, but they finally realized they can’t be a one party firm, so now Google is reaching out to Republicans.

Rooting for injuries: communications union CWA is lashing out about the lawsuit against AT&T. I don’t blame them: they were reluctant team players on Net Neutrality, and expected payback from the left when it came time for the union to absorb T-Mobile’s employees. Now the Obama administration seeks to prevent that large unionization from happening. Pass the popcorn.

Patenting space flight? Good thing for Han that Lando didn’t patent the Millennium Falcon.

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