With broadband & cell phone service becoming, via regulation, a mere public utility, telecoms seek profits by other means as well as reducing “costs” by reducing competition. One of the ways of cutting off opposition has not been the traditional way of providing a service at less cost to consumers, but cutting off competitors access to spectrum with which to compete.
And, many of the most recent of the telecoms purchase of spectrum has NOT been to “build-out” but merely to stock up on their exclusive right to additional spectrum, that they then just sit on.
Now they want the rules to expand how long they can get away with just sitting on it. You can imagine, just like patents, they will be back to lobby that the law extend those squatters rights even more in the future.
For me, a Conservative position on the public sale of spectrum would require (a) plans for using that spectrum that would start to get implemented as soon as the spectrum was acquired, and (b) a three year time limit for those plans to commence. If the plans for using that spectrum didn’t commence within 36 months, the spectrum would go back into the lots available at the next auction and they’d get no more than that auction offered.
I do not think hoarding spectrum is in the public interest and is certainly counter-productive to true competition.
They had that rule saying use it or lose it with the spectrum and it resulted in a bubble of telecom equipment manufacturers that charged too much that the service operators nearly all went bankrupt. There has to be a financial plan to make deploying new technology and services to ensure that these companies will be on going concerns.