Special Favors You Can Buy

More than anything, Americans are fed up with a government that hands out special treatment to those who purchase special favors to deep pocketed friends. Phillip Falcone has purchased a lot of friends and it's making him very rich - at your expense.

Just after the 2010 election, Falcone applied for a waiver from the FCC's restrictions on his company's spectrum. In short, SkyTerra (now named LightSquared) wanted to build a terrestrial 4G network and lease its spectrum out to other cell phone companies - perhaps AT&T or smaller carriers. LightSquared's clients could offer customers satellite connections, too, but they could also just use the towers.

Falcone won the waiver, and thus slipped his spectrum out from under the rules that allowed him to buy it for cheap.

Verizon and AT&T were not happy to have a fourth entrant into the 4G market, making it easier for smaller carriers to offer mobile Internet. But even worse, the FCC, as a condition of Falcone's purchase of the satellite company, had barred LightSquared from selling more than 25 percent of its capacity to the Big Two wireless companies, combined.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/03/regulatory-warfare-ensnares-wireless-world#ixzz1FXqDrDHz