I know you are all busy developing wireless technologies and selling your products and services. But all your efforts will be useless if we get stupid frequency regulations from the FCC. The full text of the FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) can be found here. I know you are all busy developing wireless technologies and selling your products and services. But all your efforts will be useless if we get stupid frequency regulations from the FCC. The full text of the FCC’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) can be found here.
It is time to band together and write one email to keep the FCC from hurting technology businesses and technology investors again. The fourth set of FCC Comments to Keep the FCC out of Software are due on Tuesday (June 1). Led by Public Knowledge, tech businesses are beginning to make real progress in creating a technology voice inside the FCC regulatory process.
However, we need to keep going and even accelerate our efforts to match the lobbying of large phone companies and media conglomerates who want the FCC to regulate software on a feature-by-feature business. Technology businesses represent much greater job creation and GDP growth than phone and media companies, but are vastly under-represented in DC.
This set of comments relate to specific wireless frequency regulation that sounds esoteric but is not. The FCC’s current intent in this area will hurt each and every technology business. What the FCC does with software-defined radio will have both quick and lasting effects on the overall broadband problem in the US. If we don’t change the FCC’s direction, the US will keep falling behind in terms of its per-capita broadband usage (from the dismal 15th where it currently is). The regulation that kills a digital radio startup today will grow to cripple a search engine tomorrow, prevent a chip company from being founded next year, etc.
Act in your own interest. Attention VCs: your startups need you to pressure the FCC to keep its hands off software. Support the FCC Reply Comments that are the follow-on to last month’s software-defined radio submission to the FCC.
Just send an email including your name, title, company name, snail-mail address, and phone number to sbrown [AT] publicknowledge.org.
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