After moving to a new building on the corner of 11th Street and New York Avenue, Google’s Washington office got a face lift that made it as hip and colorful as the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters. But Google’s top Washington lobbyist, Richard Whitt, won’t be spending much time amid the bouncy balls, LEGO bricks, and foosball tables this autumn. Come October, Whitt expects three times the usual number of meetings with members of Congress and Obama Administration officials. “Google and the others on our side will step up our advocacy,” he says.
Why the flurry of activity? Whitt is gearing up for what’s likely to be the biggest telecom regulatory fight in more than a decade: prying open the nation’s $200 billion wireless networks to a broader range of handsets and software-based tools, games, and entertainment. On one side are such tech companies as Google, Amazon.com, and Skype, which want to ensure that their services are as widely available as possible on the gamut of wireless devices.
Lining up against them are communications providers, including AT&T and Verizon Wireless, which oppose regulations that might constrain how they set prices, run expensive networks, and help design devices. “Virtually everyone has a stake in this,” says Darrell West, a vice-president at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “This will be the mother of all political battles.”
Breaking the Carrier-Handset Tieup?
Existing guidelines govern how telecoms provide high-speed Internet access; for instance, the Federal Communications Commission urges network operators not to impose discriminatory pricing on bandwidth use or favor some forms of traffic over others — say, by making it more expensive to download movies and music from the Internet than to view photos or call up a Web page. On Sept. 21, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski proposed expanding the informal principles and making them formal…