Petition for Reconsideration to FCC on Digital Radio Band White Space
Policy Paper
Sept. 14, 2007
The FCC should reconsider its decision to allow incumbent radio licensees to expand into neighboring spectrum without imposing additional public interest requirements. The Second Report & Order is premised on the unexamined and unsupported assumption that the Commission is not assigning new spectrum for mutually exclusive commercial uses to incumbent licensees. Because of this erroneous premise, the FCC completely fails to consider a key question of whether the spectrum should be used for alternative purposes, such as noncommercial low power FM (“LPFM”) or unlicensed uses, or auctioned pursuant to Section 309(j).
In addition, the FCC should reconsider its decision because allowing incumbent radio licensees to indefinitely occupy the sidebands surrounding their current signals, without adopting enhanced public interest requirements, unjustly enriches incumbent licensees. This spectrum may be worth billions of dollars, and may allow incumbents to provide additional program streams, engage in datacasting, and provide other types of services. Yet, the FCC neither requires licensees to pay for the use of this additional spectrum nor to provide any additional benefits to the public in return for its use.
For the full document, please see the attached PDF file below.