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Google Ends Silence On C Block Auction
Phurge found a post on the Google Policy Blog in which they lift the cone of silence that had been imposed by regulation over the recently concluded FCC spectrum auction. As some had speculated, Google was in it mainly to force some openness into the wireless industry. "Based on the way that the bidding played out, our participation in the auction helped ensure that the C Block met the reserve price. In fact, in ten of the bidding rounds we actually raised our own bid — even though no one was bidding against us — to ensure aggressive bidding on the C Block. In turn, that helped increase the revenues raised for the US Treasury, while making sure that the openness conditions would be applied to the ultimate licensee."
What it sounds like they are saying is that they had no real interest in purchasing anything, just manipulating the pricing.
I think spectrum price and end-user price are way too many steps removed to really have a direct effect. Especially since the wireless market has actual, fierce competition
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They manipulated the pricing to reach a certain threshold. Once it's bought for a certain price the owner of the license must conform to certain rules of "openness" for what can used on that spectrum.
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"Hack" in the common parlance is pretty much "to break (into) something." People who insist on other definitions of hack generally push the word "crack/cracker" to refer to this type of black-hat activity.
"Hack" in the classic MIT parlance was a nifty programming trick, or maybe just something really clever. Some people refer to awesome pranks as "hacks" (a compliment to the prankster), although normally it refers to some particularly elegant algorithm or code block.
"Hack" as referring to bad code, as in "hack-job" or "I hacked it together in three hours" is generally called a "kludge" (KLOOJ) by these people.
Maybe someone who actually went-slash-goes there could help out my amateur etymology.
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No, shill bidders are in the employ of the seller. Since Google WOULD actually have to buy the licenses if they had won at that price, they were simply risking more and more money in order to drive the price up. Not even ebay would oppose that.
They aren't trying to play this off as altruistic. It's obviously in Google's interests to have wireless be more open, so that they can sell their devices to anyone regardless of their phone company. The entry says this.
That's exactly what was done with the A, B, and E blocks. The fact is that there exist nationwide players interested in buying up nationwide licenses, and so rather than forcing them to do so by stitching together a bunch of regional licenses, the C & D blocks were set up especially for them. Of course, the D block was made a bit too specifically for a single bidder so when Frontline couldn't get any money the block didn't sell, but the C block went over so well that it was all anyone could talk about and people like yourself were left thinking that it was all that was auctioned off.