Dish, the FCC, and a sly trick to leave American taxpayers $3bn short

Wheeler as Chairman

So this is interesting! Wheeler has almost certainly been the most effective Chairman in at least 10 years, and is probably the most reasonable as well.

Let's see whether he can push past the partisanship and also pay attention to the details (like the minutiae of bidding rules for wireless spectrum) going forward. Perhaps the whole "neutrality" thing has been swallowing his time of late. I also imagine that this round of bidding was well through the process by the time he arrived, so we'll have to see in 2016.

What dish did is wrong but I have to wonder what other oversights other bidders have been allowed. It's kind of a gray area to begin with. The FCC can raise the most money by allowing the monopolies to buy up the lions share. While accepting less from smaller companies promotes competition in theory. Both aren't necessarily bad things for tax payers. The problem with the later is that there isn't even a new kid on the block to take advantage of the program. Chicken before the egg sort of thing. So until they figure out a way to encourage new players I'd rather them get as much cash from the spectrum as they can.

I find it hard to believe

That the loophole was as simple as "set up a front company to bid for you". In fact, it is impossible to believe. Does anyone really believe that with the army of lawyers AT&T and Verizon have at their disposal, neither thought of doing this?

I suspect we aren't getting the whole story, and it will turn out Ergen bribed ... made campaign contributions to ... bribed someone to write one of those specially crafted loopholes that benefit only a single company. Maybe not as bad as the ones that call out a specific city/state where a business is headquartered (and yes, those are unfortunately fairly common, especially in earmarks) but maybe something that allowed a subsidiary to be considered a 'small business' if its ownership was both below a certain threshold and the owner might hold spectrum but wasn't an actual wireless operator.

Ergen is a Grade A slimeball, he owns a company that owns a company that's leasing space on a Canadian satellite owned by a European company that is trying to use some ITU registration loophole to derail Directv's 4K plans by claiming priority on the spectrum Directv was granted in the US years ago. I'll bet if one was able to dig deep enough, he owns all the layers involved there. The FCC seems to be having none of it, but he might be able to tie it up in court for a while. He'd pimp out his own mother if it earned him an extra nickel.

Pai is full of shit and

so is McCarthy. This is the way ALL the games are played inside the Beltway and anyone who works here knows it. Congress setups up some special tax break that is supposed to benefit a select group of people (usually women, blacks, and sometimes small business but it can be just about anybody). The big players aren't allowed to get those contracts/benefits. But they are allowed to partner with other companies. So the big guys set up shell corps that qualify for the special benny, partner with them and win the contracts. It's always done nice and legal and yes it all stinks. But it isn't anything new. Dish just played the game the same way everybody else did.

In my case I work for an outfit that qualifies under both small business and minority owned because the owner's ethnicity traces to the Indian peninsula. We're partnered with a 5000+ employee woman owned business. The other minor partner is Latino owned and a small business. Might also pick up the woman benny because the owner's wife is the HR person and probably has shares in the company. Previously I've worked for an actual small business (12 people white owner, didn't last) that was absorbed by a small business woman and black owner company that lost its woman and black bennies when it became employee-owned (owner died and they needed to pump as much money out to his inheritors as possible with the lowest possible tax impact).

Nothing to see here

The article can be boiled down to "another day at the office."

Gaming the system is so common that anyone who deals with government entities knows these types of loopholes inside and out. Sounds to me that the problem was simply a dish dummy corp beat an AT&T dummy corp and they are whining about it. Whatever.

A good portion of the American people know this BS happens on a daily basis. It's not even worth getting upset over it anymore. Quite frankly the good 'ole US of A government is just as corrupt as the rest of the world. They just happen to have the biggest guns, so very few people bother to bellyache.

The FCC has been partisan for a long time...

The current law of the land is that the FCC Commissioners serve 5 year terms, are nominated by the President, and confirmed by the Senate. Besides the partisanship that comes from such a process and a term that lasts one year longer than a President's term and 1 year less than a Senator's term, there is another wrinkle: Only three of the five commissioners can be from the same political party. As the United States only has two parties, we are guaranteed a fractious, partisan FCC even if a single party held on to the Senate and White House for multiple terms.

Net neutrality only became an R vs D battle because President Obama started to come down on the side of Netflix and Google. Prior to that, it was not uncommon to see Ds in vocal opposition to net neutrality because the ISPs had filled their campaign coffers and Rs in favor of net neutrality because it sounded like "Freedom" in campaign speeches and a good way to differentiate themselves from Democrats. In short, the net neutrality thing is just another battle between well-heeled donors and eventually which Republican can cast aspersions on President Obama more quickly than the others, and Democrats circling the wagons even if two years earlier, they were happily taking money from the ISPs and proposing all those wonderful pro-RIAA and pro-Comcast bills.