As part of the grand hoopla-fest building up to the release of the Federal Communications Commission's National Broadband Plan this month, the agency hosted a Digital Inclusion Summit at Washington, DC's Newseum on Tuesday. Co-sponsored with the Knight Foundation, during the course of the event the FCC disclosed more components of The Plan. These include recommending the creation of a Digital Literacy Corps "to conduct skills training and outreach in communities with low rates of adoption," and tapping into the agency's Universal Service Fund to subsidize broadband for low income people.

But what really got our attention was this: the NBP will ask the government to "consider use of spectrum for a free or very low cost wireless broadband service.''

That's odd, we thought, since the FCC and Congress have been considering such an idea for years.

M2Z

Between 2006 and early 2009, the agency actively vetted a proposal by M2Z Networks to provide a free, wireless broadband across the United States. The FCC would lease a national spectrum license to M2Z in the Advanced Wireless Services-3 (AWS-3) band area (2155-2175MHz), and the company would offer a free, advertising-funded, 512Kpbs broadband service that filtered out indecent content. Consumers would be able to access the band area via an attachment device on their computer. The firm would also offer a faster, unfiltered premium service and pay the government 5 percent each year from its gross revenues. Once granted this band, M2Z would commit to rolling out the smut-free network to 95 percent of the US population over the course of a decade.

M2Z launched a spirited campaign to generate public interest in its proposal, which came complete with a small battalion of endorsers. "I know many Utahns would welcome the opportunity to provide their children with the educational and economic opportunity which broadband access can provide without having to become software engineers in order to protect their children," Senator Orin Hatch (R-UT) wrote to the FCC in 2007.

But while the idea received lots of shout-outs from family advocacy groups and members of Congress, the FCC rejected just granting the spectrum to a chosen entity. Then in 2008, agency chair and values voter Republican Kevin Martin came up with an alternative proposal to run an auction of that license zone—the winning bidder promising to abide by M2Z's commitments and rules.

Auction skewing

Various groups and companies quickly launched counter campaigns to stop or modify the Martin/M2Z plan. T-Mobile insisted that the service would interfere with spectrum it owned in a nearby band. And the wireless industry in general, led by CTIA - The Wireless Association, charged that the scheme would "skew an auction to the benefit of one entity or business model." Ironically, Key Republicans on Capitol Hill quickly took sides with big wireless, while Democrats backed Martin—with Rep. Anna Eschoo (D-CA) submitting a bill to the House that pretty much echoed what Martin proposed.

Meanwhile civil liberties groups and bookseller/publisher trade associations opposed the plan on different grounds. The service "would censor content far beyond anything ever upheld by any court for any medium," warned a coalition of 22 public interest groups in July of 2008. "This prohibition would plainly infringe on the rights of adults to access broad categories of lawful speech," they wrote.

In response to T-Mobile's concerns, the FCC's Office of Engineering Technology ran a battery of interference tests in Seattle that concluded that peaceful coexistence with T-Mobile's licenses was doable. As for the civil liberties concerns, to our delight, in December of that year Martin called Ars to announce that he was dropping the porn-filtering part of the plan from his proposal (Julius Genachowski, the present chair of the agency, should feel free to emulate this fine example by contacting us at his convenience).

None of these gestures did the cause much good, however. Wireless companies challenged the FCC's engineering report. And while those public interest groups were presumably assuaged by Martin's announcement, it's not as if they suddenly became big supporters of the plan overnight.

When Martin called us, we asked him what the prospects for the proposal now looked like. "This is an item that has been pending at the Commission for several years, that the Commissioners were originally critical of not having moved forward faster," he lamented. "Other commissioners said, 'We're overdue; we've got to do this.' But when an actual item is put forth where you have to make a hard decision, they say, 'Well, I'm not so sure what I want to do anymore.'"

In the end, the Commission never weighed in on the plan. Martin quit the agency the following year. To this day, the FCC has not voted on whether to launch the auction or not.

An open question

We contacted M2Z CEO John Muletta to ask him what he thought of the FCC's latest proposal for a free wireless service. His response was pretty magnanimous, given his recent fortunes with the agency.

"I think this a victory for Chairman Genachowski's data-driven process," Muletta told us, "which has independently confirmed that we have low broadband adoption in this country largely because broadband is too expensive. Certainly a free service would go a long way to addressing that issue."

But "since the FCC has yet to take action on the AWS-3 rulemaking, it's an open question as to whether the incumbent carriers will eventually hijack the process that is supposed to follow the National Broadband Plan and somehow delay the quick auction of the AWS-3 band (in the face of a spectrum crisis and drought)."

There is also some irony in the fact that the same wireless industry that once objected to skewing auctions for a single business model is now, in the name of a looming spectrum crisis, asking the FCC to coordinate the massive transfer of television license spectrum to wireless sector—essentially on the grounds that wireless broadband providers could more productively use those licenses than TV broadcasters. And where were all those Orin Hatch style Republicans once big wireless cried foul over Martin's smutless free broadband plan?

As the M2Z story indicates, anyone who proposes setting aside spectrum "for a free or very low cost wireless broadband service'' could quickly find themselves on very uncertain terrain, with positions shifting overnight, and supposedly solid allies disappearing at the last minute. We are talking, after all, about a service that consumers could get for free rather than buying it from AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, or Sprint. So here's some free advice: whoever launches the crusade at the FCC this time around better make sure they've really got the votes.