Today Federal Trade Commission member Joshua Wright offered a definition of unfair method of competition during remarks made before the New York State Bar Association’s antitrust section. Mr. Wright argued that unfair method of competition as discussed in section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act left a lot of room for re-interpretation especially as commissions change due to members joining and moving on. A policy statement that set the definition more into regulatory stone would provide businesses with more certainty as they contemplate the appropriate business models necessary for entry into a market.

Unless Mr. Wright can sell his colleagues on the ideas he presented today, I wouldn’t worry about an in-depth analysis of what he offered, although what he offered was pretty substantive. The reason his proposed policy statement caught my eye, quite frankly, was because the statement was posted in a tweet by Federal Communications Commission member Ajit Pai which signaled to me that the statement was worth a look see.

My take away as it concerns the FCC is that the nation’s regulator of interstate telecommunications seems to skirt the issue of competition in the wireless telecommunications market. The FCC currently has a docket opened to address the state of competition in the wireless market. The FCC also avoids any declaration of competition in the wireless market which is peculiar given the existence of four major national players; AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile, and a myriad of smaller carriers such as Virgin Mobile, Leap Wireless, ClearWire, and Boost Mobile.

A major part of the FCC’s problem, and I would suspect the FTC’s as well, is that they are too focused on the actual number and size of the players in the market. The very word, “market”, should be enough to set the FCC’s focus properly. Market is a relational term, and when we discuss markets, we are talking about the primary demand and supply relationship between consumer and producer. Given that the preamble of the Communications Act asks the FCC to concern itself with universal access by consumers to a communications network, the FCC has been focusing on just about everything else; from how much revenues T-Mobile generates to whether we, as consumers, actually give a damn about what management techniques Verizon uses to bring us broadband services.

Instead, the FCC’s focus should be on whether the consumers’ demand for services is being met; is the market providing the output necessary for meeting the communications needs of consumers. Given the increasing demand for smartphones and tablets with no reported problems with carriers opening up accounts, and again given the existence of four major carriers and quite a few regional carriers, the FCC should have been able to create a definition for competition that reflects what is happening in the market. It hasn’t done so. It hasn’t even tried.

What we need is a little boldness; for the FCC to step out and say, here is our policy statement on the meaning of competition. Here is what we mean by a competitive market. Until then, all I see is a 17th, 18th, and 19th state of wireless competition report that fails to definitively state that we are moving in the right direction.

The U.S. Department of Commerce yesterday put out a report documenting gaps in access to broadband between rural and urban communities as well as the variation in access to broadband within these two communities. The major conclusions of the report was that urban areas had greater access to both wireline and wireless broadband versus their neighbors in rural areas. Also, while population density played a role in which areas have higher access to broadband, locating closer to central cities may be of more significance in broadband adoption.

For example, according to the report, residents living in the exurbs, where population density is around 37 residents per square mile, have greater access to higher-speed wireline services than their counterparts in small towns, where population density is approximately 1,447 residents per square mile. Keep in mind that exurbs are considered as part of the rural community while small towns are urban areas. Exurbs, however, are part of metropolitan statistical areas (MSA) where central cities are the core of their populations. The study concludes that this proximity of exurbs to central cities may play a role in why a smaller density jurisdictions like an exurb may have greater access to higher speed services versus a small town which is not located in an MSA.

As I do here as well as on my other blog at Alton Drew, I place a lot of emphasis on accumulating and using capital, whether financial, or natural as in spectrum. Broadband is capital in the hands of creatives. Whether writers, designers, or app developers, access to broadband is key and if location to central cities increases the chances of quality broadband availability, people like me will be staying in Atlanta and other MSAs.

I had one of those moments where I was reminded that heart disease runs in the family. Delana Derakhshani, policy counsel for Consumers Union offered testimony today before the Senate Sub-Committee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet where she asserted that when it comes to consumer welfare and wireless services, economic theory does not matter. Her statement was a rebuttal to an earlier statement by Mr. George Ford, chief economist for the Phoenix Center.

My first reaction to Ms. Derakhshani’s comment was to figuratively reach for my chest and take a couple deep breaths. I couldn’t believe my ears. It was one of the most asinine statements in a Congressional hearing that I’ve ever heard ( and we know that a Congressional hearing is ripe for those kind of statements).

Anyway, after seriously contemplating a four-hour drive back to Tallahassee to formally return by economics degree and seek a refund for four years of tuition, I decided to dig into the crates and pull out an old text book and look up the definition of consumer welfare.

According to Weimer and Vining’s Policy and Analysis: Concepts and Practice, consumers seek to increase the value they extract from the market place by finding a price for a good or service that is lower than they maximum they are prepared to pay. The wider the gap between the price offered in the market and the price the consumer is willing to pay, the greater the consumers welfare.

In the competitive market that Ms. Derakhshani and other consumer advocates claim to want, the consumer is willing to pay the maximum amount, the value of the service or good, that his budget or other consumption constraints allow. In other words, it’s not up to a wireless carrier to worry about a potential wireless subscriber’s budget constraints. If the subscriber can’t afford the carrier’s text message services or data plans, the subscriber is free to do without the service or seek out another carrier who is willing to adjust their rates downward or offer some deal sweetener in order to garner the subscriber.

Just as importantly, it is not up to government to help find that balance between happy smartphone purchaser and happy wireless carrier. That’s not the role of government in a market economy.

If AT&T, Inc., and Sirius XM Radio Inc., had any concerns about last week’s Federal Communications Commission Order on Reconsideration, they did not show it in any filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The Order addressed the a revisit to remedies put in place in 2010 to address potential interference issues between Sirius XM’s terrestrial repeaters and AT&T Wireless Communications Services (WCS) base stations and customer premises equipment (CPE).

The highlight of the proceeding was an agreement between AT&T and Sirius to ground power level targets for AT&T’s WCS base and fixed stations. By implementing a self-monitoring mechanism for interference between their devices and components on their networks, both parties, as the FCC acknowledged, have made it easier to deploy mobile broadband services in the WCS spectrum while offsetting potentially harmful interference to Sirius XM’s receivers.

Investors in both companies should not see any negative impact in operations or revenues as a result of the agreement. Consumers of both companies’ services may not see any negative impact either as the agreement again works to ensure uninterrupted services. For the FCC it’s one less headache in their continued quest to identify more spectrum in order to ensure American households have access to mobile broadband services.

It looks like a rare win-win for regulators and industry.

MobileFuture published an interesting graphic which you can link to right here. It highlights that of all available spectrum, 16% of it is available for commercial use. The rest is used by television broadcasters and the federal government.

You may say, okay. Sixteen percent of all those airwaves is not that bad. That would be saying that 16% of onramps to U.S. highways available for commercial trucking is a good deal when in reality we have bigger and faster trucks lugging goods and services and more of them are demanding use of those onramps.

That is what’s happening with broadband access, particularly with mobile access. Although the wireless industry has invested $113 billion in wireless infrastructure, 330 million wireless accounts pushing up on 16% availability of spectrum spells crunch time for opening access to the airwaves. No allocation of spectrum over the last four years has only set the industry and wireless consumers back further.

The federal government is the only market for spectrum. It has established itself as gatekeeper of the resource. It has to increase its reaction time to the crisis if consumers are to continue receiving data speeds they have grown accustomed to.