Sidecut Reports

It’s hard to believe that it was just two years ago that Google co-founder Sergey Brin embarrassed himself and the company with a poorly planned attempt at lobbying Capitol Hill. Fast forward to Thursday afternoon, when the chairman of the FCC uncharacteristically hung out with Google co-founder Larry Page, walking reporters and assorted policy wonks through the machinations that led to the FCC’s decision to open up television white spaces as unregulated spectrum, a ruling pushed hard by the Googlers.

The white spaces ruling was just the latest in a string of telecom policy successes for the search giant, making it an easy call to say there’s no company currently better at manipulating regulators than the kids from Mountain View.

Meet the new boss? Google’s Rick Whitt, left, and AT&T’s Jim Cicconi.

While Google’s lead telecom lawyer (”there’s got to be a better word than lobbyist”) Rick Whitt will always point out that his staff is much smaller than the 700-strong legal troops under Jim Cicconi’s command at AT&T, Whitt’s team does have some significant arrows in its quiver which have perhaps accelerated Google’s influence: The passion supplied by geeky billionaires like Page, who can summon “M.I.T. grads who live and breathe radios” from Google’s engineering ranks to geek out with the FCC’s technical staff; the company’s quasi-religious desire to “do good by the Internet,” which still sounds wholesome even as the company admits that such efforts benefit Google on the bottom line; and its apparent disinterest in benefitting directly from legislative or regulatory action, a stance that makes Google much different from traditional telecom players whose lobbying efforts are almost always directly tied to profits.

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Now that our serious work is out of the way, here’s a quick take on the non-attributed, behind-the-scenes, from-the-hallways-or-maybe-even-the-restrooms stuff we heard at the Silicon Flatirons conference in Boulder last weekend:

Where’s AT&T? Too busy filtering traffic? Too bad reps from Ma Bell weren’t on hand in Boulder, since the company’s pledge to sift through all its traffic for possible copyright violations seemed to be part of every panel discussion, whether it was part of the topic or not. Since this was a conference mainly of lawyers, the main question seemed to be whether or not AT&T was setting itself up for legal liabilities by pledging to do deep-packet inspection on all bits running across its network. (At one point we were worried that Tim Wu was going to charge the stage in his no-need-for-a-microphone back-and-forth exchange with panelist Mark Lemley. But things calmed down.)

In the end, there seemed to be no good answer (though Level 3 CEO Jim Crowe told his lunch table that his company was legally afraid to do such inspections), especially since nobody from AT&T was around. “It doesn’t really matter if they would be guilty or not,” noted one men’s room pontificator. “No court would convict them of it anyway.” Nothing like a good cynical note to close it.

(At any rate, AT&T did sponsor the Sunday-night beer-n-wine reception, where on their dime we had a tasty 90 Shilling. Thanks!)

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