Bloodwinter Clan

With a bit of luck I might be tonight on NPR again - I should be on the Qualcomm segment of Marketplace. Sometimes they include me, sometimes I get cut out. Now if I would just overcome my speech impediment...

Woot.! As a big NPR freak myself...I'll listen for it.

NPR is good stuff, Im like half hour too far from chicago to get the broadcasts tho =/

God damn nice Bychu...knock em dead.

Dang... they didn't broadcast the story, but here is a transcript of my last appearance on NPR.

Analysis: Supreme Court rules federal regulators were wrong to take back spectrum licenses from bankrupt wireless company NextWave

650 words
27 January 2003
NPR: All Things Considered
English
Copyright 2003 National Public Radio, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

MICHELE NORRIS, host: The Supreme Court ruled today that federal regulators were wrong to take back several dozen spectrum licenses it had issued to a small wireless telephone company that went bankrupt in 1998. The case involved NextWave, one of a handful of start-up companies that bid for and won the right to sell wireless services, only to collapse when they failed to get the financing they needed. Today's ruling is expected to curtail regulators' ability to seize property in bankruptcy cases. NPR's Jim Zarroli reports.

JIM ZARROLI reporting:

In the mid-1990s, the Federal Communications Commission began auctioning off portions of the airwaves to be used by the wireless telecommunications industry that was then beginning to grow so fast. To encourage small companies to join in the bidding, the government allowed the winners to pay for the licenses in installments. One of them, the New York-based company NextWave, bid $4.7 billion for a set of licenses, but fell behind on its payments. When NextWave filed for bankruptcy in 1998, the FCC moved to take its licenses back so it could re-auction them.

NextWave maintained that its assets couldn't be seized because it had filed for bankruptcy, but the commission insisted that it had a special regulatory motive for revoking the licenses, that Congress had wanted it to do everything possible to ensure that the wireless industry stayed competitive. In its 8-to-1 ruling, the court rejected the FCC's argument. Ray Warner is a professor of law at the University of Missouri at Kansas City.

Professor RAY WARNER (University of Missouri at Kansas City): The majority of the court said the language is pretty clear. It says you can't revoke a license solely because the debtor in bankruptcy hasn't paid for it. And so even if there was some other additional regulatory purpose to be served by the revocation, that's not gonna save it.

ZARROLI: The ruling was a defeat for the government. FCC Chairman Michael Powell said the commission was trying to analyze the ramifications of the ruling, but he said it should bring needed certainty to an unsettled area of the law.

Eric Brunstad Jr., one of the attorneys representing NextWave, said the ruling sets an important precedent about the limits of governmental authority in certain bankruptcy cases.

Mr. ERIC BRUNSTAD Jr. (Attorney for NextWave): It embraces the principle that creditors in a proceeding are going to be treated equally, and it's a level playing field, that governmental agencies and governmental creditors aren't going to be able to use their status as a regulator to basically have extraordinary power or privilege in the bankruptcy unless Congress for a good reason thinks that they should.

ZARROLI: The decision means that NextWave is free to reclaim its licenses and move on, and the company today issued a statement saying it hoped to do just that. But Roger Entner, who tracks the wireless industry for The Yankee Group, says even if NextWave successfully emerges from bankruptcy, it faces enormous challenges. Entner says that in the days since NextWave bid on its licenses, the wireless market has become saturated.

Mr. ROGER ENTNER (The Yankee Group): Most of the users are already taken, and there is very, very heavy price wars going on. So for any carrier to come new to the game, it's more than an uphill battle.

ZARROLI: Entner notes that NextWave could resell its licenses to another telecommunications company if its efforts to compete don't pan out. But in the current telecom environment, those licenses are worth a lot less than they once were. NextWave may have won a big victory in court, but its battles are far from over. Jim Zarroli, NPR News, New York.

You appear on ATC often, don't you? Jim Zarroli sounds very familiar.

I am not very often on NPR or the radio for that matter. I am mostly in the print press.