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Telecom & Wireless

Free Internet For The Masses

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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FCC chair Kevin Martin can’t get off the "free internet" hobby-horse. US citizens do not get free water, electricity, gas, or telephone service. Mr. Martin believes that access to the worldwide web should be different.

It is old news that Martin wants buyers of wireless spectrum to provide no-cost internet as a part of the package. Companies who want to send signals perhaps, data, voice, and video, through the air can pay a big buck for the priviledge and then give a money-making service away. It is a plan that even Karl Marx would love.

Some members of Congress and other FCC commissioners don’t seem to see it Martin’s way. According to The Wall Street Journal, "Mr. Martin said he pulled the item from Thursday’s FCC agenda because other members of the five-member commission had questions about it."

Among those questions is why the hell would anyone do that.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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