Richard Martin  

Editor in Chief, VON

On a sunny, brisk day in Washington, D.C., when the nation’s first African-American president was sworn in, another transition also took place: Kevin Martin’s resignation as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission became official. Martin is expected to be replaced by Julius Genachowski, a venture capitalist and Harvard Law School classmate of President Obama.

While Martin’s four-year term as chairman (he spent a total of eight years as a commissioner) was not without accomplishment, it’s safe to say his tenure was mixed at best. Taking over as chairman in 2004, he had four primary tasks that would define his career: managing the transition to digital TV, distributing the valuable wireless spectrum in the 700MHz band, opening up telecom competition to new entrants including the so-called “competitive local exchange carriers,” or CLECs, and increasing access to broadband Internet services across the country. None of those four has worked out for the best.

The transition to digital TV has been a mess, marked by squabbling among the major networks, cable providers, and large carriers. The Obama transition team, in fact, has proposed delaying the transition to work out some of the issues that should have been resolved by the Martin-led FCC.

The once-in-a-generation 700MHz auction, held in early 2008, was a triumph for the status quo, as the incumbent carriers, primarily Verizon Wireless (VZ) and AT&T (T), won most of the prized airwaves.

Competition in the telecom industry? What a joke. Martin’s efforts to reform the broken intercarrier compensation system were DOA, and as VON senior editor Kelly Teal reported last month, “Martin has been a staunch foe of the cable industry for reasons that never have been entirely clear,” and “has approved, without a seeming second thought, major telecom mergers that threaten competition.”

And on broadband access, arguably the single most important indicator of the FCC’s progress, Martin has failed miserably. “Despite what some advocates and analysts claim,” the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation reported last year, “the United States is behind in broadband performance and its rank has been falling since 2001.” In the ITIF’s listings of top broadband countries, the U.S. ranks 15th based on a composite index of broadband indicators including penetration, speed, and price.

What’s more, Martin leaves behind a demoralized and dysfunctional agency. A report from the House Energy and Commerce Committee last month found that Martin’s “heavy-handed, opaque, and non-collegial management style has created distrust, suspicion, and turmoil among the five current commissioners,” and that the outgoing chairman “manipulated, withheld or suppressed data, reports, and information” in order to guide the commission’s policies.

In other words, Martin has been about average among Bush Administration appointees. Good riddance.

User Comments !

Your assessment is all too accurate from our perspective as the national association for Amateur Radio. Under Chairman Martin, the FCC continued its irrationally exuberant promotion of Broadband over Power Lines (BPL) as a potential "third wire" for delivering consumer broadband despite its obvious technical shortcomings, ultimately forcing us to challenge in the Court of Appeals the FCC's inadequate rules to protect radiocommunication services from BPL interference (we won). For us, the sweetest words in the new Administration's technology agenda are these:

Restore Scientific Integrity to the White House: Restore the basic principle that government decisions should be based on the best-available, scientifically-valid evidence and not on ideological predisposition.

Posted by: David Sumner | January 21 2009 07:57:35

Indeed, the wave of telecom carrier mergers over the last 3-4 years has not only reduced competition, but created significant problems for innocent customers who signed contracts and just wanted connectivity to operate their businesses - but were forced to pay re-implementation fees and/or sign new and less advantageous contracts for the convenience of the purchasing entity.

Posted by: Ben Stiegler | January 21 2009 08:40:37