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Pai’s Legacy of Progress in Closing the Rural Digital Divide

Gus Hurwitz —  19 January 2021

[TOTM: The following is part of a digital symposium by TOTM guests and authors on the legal and regulatory issues that arose during Ajit Pai’s tenure as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. The entire series of posts is available here.

Justin “Gus” Hurwitz is associate professor of law, the Menard Director of the Nebraska Governance and Technology Center, and co-director of the Space, Cyber, and Telecom Law Program at the University of Nebraska College of Law. He is also director of law & economics programs at the International Center for Law & Economics.]

I was having a conversation recently with a fellow denizen of rural America, discussing how to create opportunities for academics studying the digital divide to get on-the-ground experience with the realities of rural telecommunications. He recounted a story from a telecom policy event in Washington, D.C., from not long ago. The story featured a couple of well-known participants in federal telecom policy as they were talking about how to close the rural digital divide. The punchline of the story was loud speculation from someone in attendance that neither of these bloviating telecom experts had likely ever set foot in a rural town.

And thus it is with most of those who debate and make telecom policy. The technical and business challenges of connecting rural America are different. Rural America needs different things out of its infrastructure than urban America. And the attitudes of both users and those providing service are different here than they are in urban America.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Aji Pai—as I get to refer to him in writing for perhaps the last time—gets this. As is well-known, he is a native Kansan. He likely spent more time during his time as chairman driving rural roads than this predecessor spent hobnobbing at political fundraisers. I had the opportunity on one of these trips to visit a Nebraska farm with him. He was constantly running a bit behind schedule on this trip. I can attest that this is because he would wander off with a farmer to look at a combine or talk about how they were using drones to survey their fields. And for those cynics out there—I know there are some who don’t believe in the chairman’s interest in rural America—I can tell you that it meant a lot to those on the ground who had the chance to share their experiences.

Rural Digital Divide Policy on the Ground

Closing the rural digital divide is a defining public-policy challenge of telecommunications. It’s right there in the first sentence of the Communications Act, which established the FCC:

For the purpose of regulating interstate and foreign commerce in communication by wire and radio so as to make available, so far as possible, to all the people of the United States…a rapid, efficient, Nation-wide, and world-wide wire and radio communication service[.]

Depending on how one defines broadband internet, somewhere between 18 and 35 million Americans lack broadband internet access. No matter how you define it, however, most of those lacking access are in rural America.

It’s unsurprising why this is the case. Looking at North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska—three of the five most expensive states to connect each household in both the 2015 and 2018 Connect America Fund models—the cost to connect a household to the internet in these states was twice that of connecting a household in the rest of the United States. Given the low density of households in these areas, often less than one household per square mile, there are relatively fewer economies of scale that allow carriers to amortize these costs across multiple households. We can add that much of rural America is both less wealthy than more urban areas and often doesn’t value the benefits of high-speed internet as highly. Taken together, the cost of providing service in these areas is much higher, and the demand for them much less, than in more urban areas.

On the flip side are the carriers and communities working to provide access. The reality in these states is that connecting those who live here is an all-hands-on-deck exercise. I came to Nebraska with the understanding that cable companies offer internet service via cable and telephone companies offer internet service via DSL or fiber. You can imagine my surprise the first time I spoke to a carrier who was using a mix of cable, DSL, fiber, microwave, and Wi-Fi to offer service to a few hundred customers. And you can also imagine my surprise when he started offering advice to another carrier—ostensibly a competitor—about how to get more performance out of some older equipment. Just last week, I was talking to a mid-size carrier about how they are using fixed wireless to offer service to customers outside of their service area as a stopgap until fiber gets out to the customer’s house.

Pai’s Progress Closing the Rural Digital Divide

This brings us to Chairman Pai’s work to close the rural digital divide. Literally on his first day on the job, he announced that his top priority was closing the digital divide. And he backed this up both with the commission’s agenda and his own time and attention.

On Chairman Pai’s watch, the commission completed the Connect America Fund Phase II Auction. More importantly, it initiated the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) and the 5G Fund for Rural America, both expressly targeting rural connectivity. The recently completed RDOF auction promises to connect 10 million rural Americans to the internet; the 5G Fund will ensure that all but the most difficult-to-connect areas of the country will be covered by 5G mobile wireless. These are top-line items on Commissioner Pai’s resume as chairman. But it is important to recognize how much of a break they were from the commission’s previous approach to universal service and the digital divide. These funding mechanisms are best characterized by their technology-neutral, reverse-auction based approach to supporting service deployment.

This is starkly different from prior generations of funding, which focused on subsidizing specific carriers to provide specific levels of service using specific technologies. As I said above, the reality on the ground in rural America is that closing the digital divide is an all-hands-on-deck exercise. It doesn’t matter who is offering service or what technology they are using. Offering 10 mbps service today over a rusty barbed wire fence or a fixed wireless antenna hanging off the branch of a tree is better than offering no service or promising fiber that’s going to take two years to get into the ground. And every dollar saved by connecting one house with a lower-cost technology is a dollar that can be used to connect another house that may otherwise have gone unconnected.

The combination of the reverse-auction and technology-neutral approaches has made it possible for the commission to secure commitments to connect a record number of houses with high-speed internet over an incredibly short period of time.

Then there are the chairman’s accomplishments on the spectrum and wireless–internet fronts. Here, he faced resistance from both within the government and industry. In some of the more absurd episodes of government in-fighting, he tangled with protectionist interests within the government to free up CBRS and other mid-band spectrum and to authorize new satellite applications. His support of fixed and satellite wireless has the potential to legitimately shake up the telecom industry. I honestly have no idea whether this is going to prove to be a good or bad bet in the long term—whether fixed wireless is going to be able to offer the quality and speed of service its proponents promise or whether it instead will be a short-run misallocation of capital that will require clawbacks and re-awards of funding in another few years—but the embrace of the technology demonstrated decisive leadership and thawed a too limited and ossified understanding of what technologies could be used to offer service. Again, as said above, closing the rural digital divide is an all-hands-on-deck problem; we do ourselves no favors by excluding possible solutions from our attempts to address it.

There is more that the commission did under Chairman Pai’s leadership, beyond the commission’s obvious order and actions, to close the rural digital divide. Over the past two years, I have had opportunities to work with academic colleagues from other disciplines on a range of federal funding opportunities for research and development relating to next generation technologies to support rural telecommunications, such as programs through the National Science Foundation. It has been wonderful to see increased FCC involvement in these programs. And similarly, another of Chairman Pai’s early initiatives was to establish the Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee. It has been rare over the past few years for me to be in a meeting with rural stakeholders that didn’t also include at least one member of a BDAC subcommittee. The BDAC process was a valuable way to communicate information up the chair, to make sure that rural stakeholders’ voices were heard in D.C.

But the BDAC process had another important effect: it made clear that there was someone in D.C. who was listening. Commissioner Pai said on his first day as chairman that closing the digital divide was his top priority. That’s easy to just say. But establishing a committee framework that ensures that stakeholders regularly engage with an appointed representative of the FCC, putting in the time and miles to linger with a farmer to talk about the upcoming harvest season, these things make that priority real.

Rural America certainly hopes that the next chair of the commission will continue to pay us as much attention as Chairman Pai did. But even if they don’t, we can rest with some comfort that he has set in motion efforts—from the next generation of universal service programs to supporting research that will help develop the technologies that will come after—that will serve us will for years to come.

In Administrative Law, Broadband, Federal Communications Commission, International Center for Law & Economics, Regulation, Regulatory Reform, Retrospective on Ajit Pai’s Tenure as FCC Chairman, Symposia, Telecommunications, Truth on the Market, Wireless , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Europe Should Let Competition Run Its Course In Motorola Patent Dispute

Geoffrey Manne —  5 April 2012

On Tuesday the European Commission opened formal proceedings against Motorola Mobility based on its patent licensing practices surrounding some of its core cellular telephony, Internet video and Wi-fi technology. The Commission’s concerns, echoing those raised by Microsoft and Apple, center on Motorola’s allegedly high royalty rates and its efforts to use injunctions to enforce the “standards-essential patents” at issue.

As it happens, this development is just the latest, like so many in the tech world these days, in Microsoft’s ongoing regulatory, policy and legal war against Google, which announced in August it was planning to buy Motorola.

Microsoft’s claim and the Commission’s concern that Motorola’s royalty offer was, in Microsoft’s colorful phrase, “so over-reaching that no rational company could ever have accepted it or even viewed it as a legitimate offer,” is misplaced. Motorola is seeking a royalty rate for its patents that is seemingly in line with customary rates.

In fact, Microsoft’s claim that Motorola’s royalty ask is extraordinary is refuted by its own conduct. As one commentator notes:

Microsoft complained that it might have to pay a tribute of up to $22.50 for every $1,000 laptop sold, and suggested that it might be fairer to pay just a few cents. This is the firm that is thought to make $10 to $15 from every $500 Android device that is sold, and for a raft of trivial software patents, not standard essential ones.

Seemingly forgetting this, Microsoft criticizes Motorola’s royalty ask on its 50 H.264 video codec patents by comparing it to the amount Microsoft pays for more than 2000 other patents in the video codec’s patent pool, claiming that the former would cost it $4 billion while the latter costs it only $6.5 million. But this is comparing apples and oranges. It is not surprising to find some patents worth orders of magnitude more than others and to find that license rates are a complicated function of the contracting parties’ particular negotiating positions and circumstances. It is no more inherently inappropriate for Microsoft to rake in 2-3% of the price of every Nook Barnes and Nobles sells than it is for Motorola to net 2.25% of the price of each Windows-operated computer sold – which is the royalty rate Motorola is seeking and which Microsoft wants declared anticompetitive out of hand.

It’s not clear how much negotiation, if any, has taken place between the companies over the terms of Microsoft’s licensing of Motorola’s patents, but what is clear is that Microsoft’s complaint, echoed by the EC, is based on the size of Motorola’s initial royalty demand and its use of a legal injunction to enforce its patent rights. Unfortunately, neither of these is particularly problematic, especially in an environment where companies like Microsoft and Apple aggressively wield exactly such tools to gain a competitive negotiating edge over their own competitors.

The court adjudicating this dispute in the ongoing litigation in U.S. district court in Washington has thus far agreed. The court denied Microsoft’s request for summary judgment that Motorola’s royalty demand violated its RAND commitment, noting its disagreement with Microsoft’s claim that “it is always facially unreasonable for a proposed royalty rate to result in a larger royalty payment for products that have higher end prices. Indeed, Motorola has previously entered into licensing agreements for its declared-essential patents at royalty rates similar to those offered to Microsoft and with royalty rates based on the price of the end product.”

The staggering aggregate numbers touted by Microsoft in its complaint and repeated by bloggers and journalists the world over are not a function of Motorola seeking an exorbitant royalty but rather a function Microsoft’s selling a lot of operating systems and earning a lot of revenue doing it. While the aggregate number ($4 billion, according to Microsoft) is huge, it is, as the court notes, based on a royalty rate that is in line with similar agreements.

The court also takes issue with Microsoft’s contention that the mere offer of allegedly unreasonable terms constitutes a breach of Motorola’s RAND commitment to license its patents on commercially reasonable terms. Quite sensibly, the court notes:

[T]he court is mindful that at the time of an initial offer, it is difficult for the offeror to know what would in fact constitute RAND terms for the offeree. Thus, what may appear to be RAND terms from the offeror’s perspective may be rejected out-of-pocket as non-RAND terms by the offeree. Indeed, it would appear that at any point in the negotiation process, the parties may have a genuine disagreement as to what terms and conditions of a license constitute RAND under the parties’ unique circumstances.

Resolution of such an impasse may ultimately fall to the courts. Thus the royalty rate issue is in fact closely related to the second issue raised by the EC’s investigation: the use or threat of injunction to enforce standards-essential patents.

While some scholars and many policy advocates claim that injunctions in the standards context raise the specter of costly hold-ups (patent holders extracting not only the market value of their patent, but also a portion of the costs that the infringer would incur if it had to implement its technology without the patent), there is no empirical evidence supporting the claim that patent holdup is a pervasive problem.

And the theory doesn’t comfortably support such a claim, either. Motorola, for example, has no interest in actually enforcing an injunction: Doing so is expensive and, notably, not nearly as good for the bottom line as actually receiving royalties from an agreed-upon contract. Instead, injunctions are, just like the more-attenuated liability suit for patent infringement, a central aspect of our intellectual property system, the means by which innovators and their financiers can reasonably expect a return on their substantial up-front investments in technology development.

Moreover, and apparently unbeknownst to those who claim that injunctions are the antithesis of negotiated solutions to licensing contests, the threat of injunction actually facilitates efficient transacting. Injunctions provide clearer penalties than damage awards for failing to reach consensus and are thus better at getting both parties on to the table with matched expectations. And this is especially true in the standards-setting context where the relevant parties are generally repeat players and where they very often have both patents to license and the need to license patents from the standard—both of which help to induce everyone to come to the table, lest they find themselves closed off from patents essential to their own products.

Antitrust intervention in standard setting negotiations based on an allegedly high initial royalty rate offer or the use of an injunction to enforce a patent is misdirected and costly. One of the clearest statements of the need for antitrust restraint in the standard setting context comes from a June 2011 comment filed with the FTC:

[T]he existence of a RAND commitment to offer patent licenses should not preclude a patent holder from seeking preliminary injunctive relief. . . . Any uniform declaration that such relief would not be available if the patent holder has made a commitment to offer a RAND license for its essential patent claims in connection with a standard may reduce any incentives that implementers might have to engage in good faith negotiations with the patent holder.

Most of the SSOs and their stakeholders that have considered these proposals over the years have determined that there are only a limited number of situations where patent hold-up takes place in the context of standards-setting. The industry has determined that those situations generally are best addressed through bi-lateral negotiation (and, in rare cases, litigation) as opposed to modifying the SSO’s IPR policy [by precluding injunctions or mandating a particular negotiation process].

The statement’s author? Why, Microsoft, of course.

Patents are an important tool for encouraging the development and commercialization of advanced technology, as are standard setting organizations. Antitrust authorities should exercise great restraint before intervening in the complex commercial negotiations over technology patents and standards. In Motorola’s case, the evidence of conduct that might harm competition is absent, and all that remains are, in essence, allegations that Motorola is bargaining hard and enforcing its property rights. The EC should let competition run its course.

In Antitrust & Competition, Apple, European Union, Google, Intellectual Property, International, Patent, Platforms, Standard Setting, Telecommunications, Wireless , , , , , , , ,
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