No due diligence for Frontline Wireless? Special favors for special interests?

Congrats to Jeff Eisenach of Criterion Economics for his outstanding and incisive analysis "Due Diligence: Risk Factors in the Frontline Proposal."

• Jeff Eisenach wonderfully brings clear thinking and common sense to a topic that sorely needs it.

The analysis exposes the Google-supported Frontline Wireless proposal for what it is... a "trust us" investment of effectively billions of dollars in forgone receipts due to the American taxpayer in a free market auction.

• Jeff explains that any prudent investor would want, need and expect an exit process from such a huge, risky and complicated "investment."
• Frontline offers American taxpayers "No Exit" from their scheme to have the US government endorse, subsidize, and effectively guarantee their business plan.
• Common sense says never get into a financial committment that you never can get out of.
• Jeff also points out that there is remarkably weak disclosure of what Frontline wireless will do with this earmarked investment of billions of dollars in diverted taxpayer receipts.
• When the US government spends taxpayer money it has to go through Congress' budget and appropriations processes and the Executive Branch's budget and procurement processes. 
• How can the FCC think it can effectively appropriate,  earmark, allocate and spend billions of dollars of funds due the American taxpayer for the benefit of a private company in a process that is not subject to public scrutiny nor subject to the normal governmental processes that ensure the American taxpayer is not vulnerable to waste, fraud and abuse?

If the Congress wants to abandon over a decade of free-market spectrum auctions -- and approve the effective earmarking of prime spectrum  to a new monopoly wireless wholesaler subject to net neutrality regulations for the first time -- like the Frontline Wireless proposal does -- Congress needs to pass a law to do so.

• The FCC should not try and do it in the back room, through the back door without the sunshine of public scrutiny and defensible due diligence.
• If the FCC somehow approves the Frontline Wireless proposal, they effectively will "own it" and be responsible for any of its deficiencies whether they be: operational, financial, technical, safety, or legal. 

As Jeff Eisenach's outstanding analysis proves, the Frontline proposal is fraught with undisclosed and inappropriate risk to the American taxpayer.

• The FCC would do well to "save the American taxpayer" from this naked corporate welfare scheme.