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Google announced that it planned to bid in the 700 MHz spectrum auction. In a letter to FCC chairman Kevin Martin, the company said that if the auction had an open access build out requirement it would be prepared to spend at least $4.6 billion to win the spectrum. At the same time AT&T reversed its earlier position and endorsed Martin's current plan for the spectrum auction. Since the open access requirement in Martin's proposal does not apply to existing networks, AT&T no longer considered the auction rules a threat to its business model.
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In a letter to the FCC, Toyota tentatively endorsed the XM-Sirius merger. The car company, which offers XM and Sirius satellite radios in several of its models, said that is primary concern was that “the merger not threaten the continued viability of equipment already installed in vehicles, or require excessive and time consuming investments in developing and deploying new hardware.” Interoperable radios that could receive both XM and Sirius signals would be expensive to make, and may make the models in Toyota's cars obsolete.
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Meanwhile, Clearchannel used the XM-Sirius debate to call for radio ownership deregulation: “The only circumstance under which approval of the proposed merger might survive scrutiny under the Commission's public interest test would be if the Commission were to contemporaneously eliminate all local radio ownership regulations,” wrote ClearChannel VP Andrew Levin. Levin argues that a merged satellite company would have a huge advantage in spectrum and quality of programming over smaller local stations. ClearChannel's arguments reinforce what we have said before: that terrestrial radio companies see a merged XM-Sirius as a competitor, not a parallel industry. The FCC will likely make a ruling on the merger sometime in August.
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The Broadband Data Improvement Act was unanimously approved by the Senate Commerce Committee yesterday. Currently the FCC's data on broadband penetration is woefully imprecise. The definition of broadband is any connection speed over 200 Kbps, and regional penetration is measured only as accurately as ZIP codes. If the bill is enacted, the FCC would be charged with creating new definitions for broadband speeds, and measuring penetration by the more specific ZIP+4 codes.
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On Thursday the House approved an appropriations bill which, among other things mandated that researchers receiving funding from the National Institutes of Health must publish their work in an Open Access format. Currently the NIH only suggests that researchers do so, with little results. However, the appropriations bill faces a veto from President Bush, who claimed that Congress was spending too much.
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