Susan P Crawford, Columnist

AT&T Tries to Bully the Government

AT&T has threatened to stay out of the FCC's planned spectrum auction. The commission should stay the course.

April 22, 2014 at 3:28 PM UTC

Susan Crawford, the John A. Reilly visiting professor in intellectual property at Harvard Law School, is the author of "Captive Audience." Her book "The Responsive City," with co-author Stephen Goldsmith, will be published in September. In 2009, Susan Crawford served as special assistant to President Barack Obama for science, technology, and innovation policy. She is a former law partner at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering (now WilmerHale). She is the founder of OneWeb Day, a global Earth Day for the Internet held each Sept. 22. She earned a bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, and a law degree from Yale University.

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Last week, AT&T Inc. said that if the Federal Communications Commission insists on limiting the number of spectrum licenses a wireless carrier can buy in its planned auction, AT&T might not participate at all. AT&T's overreach should be resisted by the FCC and by the public. We need smaller competing carriers, such as T-Mobile US Inc. and Sprint Corp., to have access to low-frequency spectrum, and the 2015 auction is the last best chance to reach that end.

T-Mobile Chief Financial Officer Braxton Carter has famously called the U.S. wireless sector a "predatory duopoly," with AT&T and Verizon Communications Inc. the predators and Sprint and T-Mobile the prey. Over the last year, AT&T and Verizon accounted for almost all the sector's profits; from 2009 to 2013, the two giants accounted for more than 85 percent of the increase in profits that the sector has enjoyed.