Protect the free market! Block AT&T!

The government is soon going to authorize the sale of some more of our mobile phone spectrum.

Should the goal of the auction be:

(1) Get as much as possible from that auction, regardless of who buys the spectrum?
(2) Manage the sale for the long term good of consumers?
(3) Get government off the back of god-fearing, job-creating businessmen?

Okay, okay, you're right. It was a trick question.

Next month, bills will be introduced in Congress that may include language that allows the FCC to structure who can bid on the spectrum. The "Government is bad! Always bad!" crowd will of course scream "Freedom! Let capitalism work!"

Except we know that market capitalism can harm market capitalism. Where limited resources are concerned, like oil or railroads or tobacco in the 19th century when the Sherman Anti-trust act was enforced, sometimes the government has to protect market capitalism from itself.

In the 1890s, the Rockefellers crushed many companies and put many people out of work with their money. The same threat exists today. We need competition in the mobile phone industry and there is national interest in seeing that competition can flourish.

Fighting monopoly is fighting for free market. Fighting concentration of power is fighting for small businesses and is pro-business.

This is even more true of the mobile industry than it was with oil. This is our spectrum. And if We, The People decide to foster competition and protect free markets by selling that spectrum to competitors of AT&T and Verizon, that is advocating for the free market, it is not "socialism," despite what the fear mongers on the right, the pro-monopolists and their lackeys like Rep. Greg Walden, would have you believe.

Promoting free enterprise in this case means potentially limiting who can bid on the spectrum and potentially taking a loss in the short run so that competition can, in the long run, keep prices competitive.

(By the way, I almost included the Boston Tea Party as an example. I'll submit, just for the joy of it, that the East India Company was in collusion with the British Crown. It was their tea! That's the history of influence of business on government. If the "Tea Party" wanted to be true to its namesake, it would join the Occupy Wall Street folks and demand that corporate scofflaws go to jail.

Big pharma, Goldman Sachs, the insurers, those are the East India Company of today. Don't tread on me!

At some point, some smart grad student at Berkeley or Stanford or the University of Chicago or Wharton will do a study on the minimum number of competitors required for a market to remain healthy, and how barriers to entry into that market affect that number.

My theory is that markets with higher barriers to entry require more existing competitors to be healthy, because companies outside a market that see the attractive profits will find it more difficult get in.

I will join the right wing in saying the Supreme Court has failed America. The overturning of campaign finance laws was to allow the East India Company to marry into the royal family. Talk about protecting an institution from incest! )

Google + Motorola + T-Mobile = ?

I can't be the only one thinking this.

Smart or stupid or ridiculous or common sense, someone with a lot more horsepower than me has thought of this. So why haven't I read anything about it?

Now that ATT's bid to stifle competition -- with Verizon's tacit if silent support -- has hit rough water, why doesn't Google tender a bid for T-Mobile? Say $25 billion or so? Google can afford it, and if my recently demised (not Google's fault, I dropped it corner-first to my concrete floor) Nexus S is any indication, the "pure Google" experience would draw many fans.

What a wonderfully disruptive party that could start.

I think a Google purchase of T-Mob should pass anti-trust concerns. It could increase competition in the market rather than diminish it, with Google cash shoring up T-mob's weak position. With software/hardware/network integration, it would possibly speed up the rate of innovation and lower prices across the market.

Why not? We could anticipate ATT, Verizon and Sprint would pretty much stop selling Android phones immediately. Since Google's business model has a primary strategy of market penetration, that would be a problem.

But the same argument could be made that Samsung and HTC would stop making Android phones after Google's purchase of Motorola's phone business. While that hasn't happened yet, it's still early. We also don't know what Google execs told the manufacturers to allay their concerns.

Still, it makes one smile to think of buying an Google Android phone made by Google Motorola to run on a Google T-Mobile.

I wouldn't be able to have one, though. T-Mobile reception sucks where I live in the mountains, even worse than ATT. And since I can't even have a land line ... where's my Bionic or Nexus Prime, Verizon?

Of course, now that I think about it, another contender for T-Mobile might be... oh no, it can't be ... might be ... I can't stand it ... he owns my music, his computers fill my house, he wants my TV ... oh, Mr. Jobs, please let go of my future ...