Skip to main content

Sprint and T-Mobile Getting Scrod?






Old joke.


A traveller who is a huge fan of seafood arrives in Boston for the first time.  He leaves the airport and hails a cab.  After he gets in, he excitedly says to the cabbie, "Hey, I'm new in town.  Can you tell me a good place to go to get scrod?"  The cabbie replies [in a thick Boston accent], "Pal, I've got to congratulate you.  I've heard that question a lot over the years, but that's the first time I've ever heard it in the pluperfect subjunctive."


That joke is so old that it was first told in an era when large numbers of people could explain what the pluperfect subjunctive is. [You can google it if you like, but of course it won't help. You either find the joke funny or not regardless.]


Anyway, I can't help but wonder how badly T-Mobile and Sprint are finding themselves scrod by the recent FCC ruling on an airwaves auction.


So far as I understand it -- The FCC has set the rules so that most of the available bits of wirelessness will end up sold either to Verizon or AT&T. The two second-tier companies, T-Mobile and Sprint, will get something, but they will remain clearly second tier firms when its over. Indeed, the rules seem to lock the tiers into place.


Also, the rules came along with a stern admonition against merging. Presumably if Sprint and T-Mobile did merge then the combined firm could be in some sense first tier, entitled to a seat at the grown-up table at this auction. But no ... that's not allowed. The rules are designed so that the FCC can re-write them to the disadvantage of any parties that seek to merge with each other while the auction is pending. According to the news account to which I've just linked you, one FTC commissioner, Ajit Pai, said: "We all know what the item has in mind here."


What the item has in mind. A strange expression: does the agenda item itself have intentions? Does it have a mind?


Anyway, it seems that the FCC is telling those two firms that not only have they been consigned to the kiddy table, but that any effort to move to the adult table will get them exiled from the feast altogether.


Somebody tell me if I misunderstand.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more