Just when the pending 600 MHz “incentive” FCC auction looks like it could not get more unworkably complex than a reverse, “incentive,” auction with looming FCC bidder limits, T-Mobile proposes to add a “dynamic” twist where the rules would then change as the auction goes along depending on how much bidders bid relative to a government-estimate that may or may not have any basis in economic reality.
To use a diving metaphor, this is like a synchronized diving event with unknown dozens of divers that first must do a “reverse” back flip to “incentivize” another set of divers right behind them to then do a front flip, but only if the particular diver before them does a reverse back flip that individually gets a good enough score to make a follow-on dive possible, and then if that happens for some of the diver teams, any follow-on dives would then be scored “dynamically” depending on a random target score of the previous dive, which would then determine if said diver can dive again or not.
That’s essentially the latest T-Mobile “dynamic spectrum rules” proposal for the 600 MHz auction that T-Mobile just proposed and released to reporters.
It can and does get worse.
The economist behind the T-Mobile proposal was Deputy FCC Economist when the FCC was nano-implementing the 1996 Telecom Act and came up with TELRIC pricing and UNE-P. UNE-P was an elaborate FCC ruse to get around the plain language of the Telecom Act and get a 50-60% resale discount for all telecom services (a platform) for CLECs, rather than the ~20% platform resale discount methodology in law.
