OSTP Official Emphasizes Need to Restore FCC Auction Authority, Cites Spectrum Strategy Optimism

A White House Office of Science and Technology Policy official supported restoring the FCC’s spectrum auction authority but also emphasized during a Media Institute event Wednesday that all federal agencies need “an opportunity to be heard” before the commission makes a major spectrum policy decision. The FCC’s mandate expired last month amid efforts to delay congressional action on repurposing parts of the 3.1-3.45 GHz band for commercial use until after a DOD study of its systems on the frequency (see 2303090074). Austin Bonner, OSTP's assistant director-spectrum and telecom policy, also noted optimism about the trajectory of work on a national spectrum strategy, after NTIA’s Tuesday listening session at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

“We just have to reinstate” the FCC’s auction authority, Bonner said. “The auction mechanism has proven to be a critical component in ensuring nonfederal spectrum serves its best and highest use.” Communications “stakeholders must be able to trust the predictability and reliability of that mechanism,” she said. Lobbyists and others are increasingly pessimistic that Congress will be able to end an impasse with Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., to allow an extension of the FCC’s remit that doesn’t end before the Sept. 30 close of FY 2023, citing perceptions there’s not an appetite to use Senate floor time on the issue (see 2303280059).

“We need strong values-driven leadership that can cut through institutional conflict at the highest levels and at every level,” Bonner said. “In the middle of an interference dispute or legislative debate, it can be easy to dig in on” specific priorities. “Usually the solution that we’re reaching for requires balancing many, many competing considerations,” but the emphasis needs to be on “shared values” that will ensure all parties keep “coming back to a reliable space for negotiation,” she said: That “can keep spectrum disputes from growing into institutional conflicts that make future spectrum management challenges even harder to address.”

The Biden administration is “working to institutionalize a trustworthy, predictable process for managing change and spectrum allocations and for resolving disputes,” something the FCC and NTIA have exemplified via their updated spectrum memorandum of understanding, Bonner said. “We're also maintaining an active interagency process. All stakeholders, including federal users, need assurance that spectrum decisions will be made in a process that gives notice and an opportunity to be heard. And all of the stakeholders need to operate with a high degree of transparency so that all the relevant arguments information are on the table at the time when decisions are made.”

NTIA’s listening sessions on the spectrum strategy, including one in late March (see 2303300051), “have already surfaced a wide variety of views and important considerations,” Bonner said. “We recognize that we’re not writing on a blank slate” and “I expect” to have “a voluminous record to work with” in putting the strategy together. She cited presentations “from the academic and research community” at the Tuesday Notre Dame session that looked “ahead to a future that doesn’t have to be exactly like the spectrum challenges that we face today.” Much “of what we do here has historical precedents” since “we are all involved in spectrum management processes that have been going on forever,” Bonner said: “It was really interesting to hear” participants “address some different ways of thinking about” if “we were writing on a slightly blanker slate, how we might do some things differently.”