Jonathan V. Cohen helps guide companies in the telecommunications, broadband and media sectors as they evaluate and cultivate business opportunities in a constantly shifting legal, regulatory and political landscape, leveraging his over 30 years of private practice and government experience in policy and transactional matters. He regularly appears on behalf of clients before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and other executive branch agencies whose work touches their interests. Mr. Cohen is a recognized expert in spectrum transactions and wireless policy, and particularly in the rules and processes governing spectrum auctions (including incentive auctions). He holds the Martindale Hubbell AV® Preeminent Peer Review Rating, has been selected multiple times as a Washington DC Super Lawyer, and has been singled out for nationwide recognition by his clients for “outstanding service” on corporate and commercial transactions.

Mr. Cohen joined the firm in 1998 after serving five-and-a-half years in senior staff positions at The White House and the FCC, where his work earned awards and recognition from a national legal publication. At the FCC, he was responsible for crafting rules to govern spectrum auctions, directed the FCC's first broadband PCS auction, formulated wireless competition and media policies, and spearheaded the FCC's effort to ensure that wireline telecommunications carriers adequately addressed the Year 2000 computer problem. He also served as counsel to the President's Advisory Committee on Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters. Before entering government service, Mr. Cohen practiced law in Washington, D.C., and prior to law school, was a news reporter at a major market radio station. He serves on the board of an non-profit organization.

My law firm partner, Jonathan Cohen, has been closely monitoring the developments in the regulation of social media and other big tech platforms by the current administration.  He offers these thoughts on likely areas of legislative and regulatory action in this area in the coming year. 

Many nights, the last thing I do before falling asleep is put down my phone, and the first thing I do upon waking is pick it up.  I know I’m not alone in this.  And how many times have we made an online purchase from bed?  Internet-enabled digital technologies seem to have transformed life for most Americans, changing how we conduct business, connect with each other, and receive information and entertainment.  The advent of these technologies in recent years is what former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, in his 2019 book From Gutenberg to Google, calls the “third major network revolution,” after the invention of movable-type printing and the innovations in travel and communications brought about by railroads and the telegraph.  This new revolution is rapidly changing our information ecosystem.

Beyond the commercial opportunities and challenges presented for tech, media, and telecom companies, as well as content creators, the societal impact of this third major network revolution is fascinating and wide-ranging, but also potentially troubling.  Illustrating the power that tech platforms exert over us, Taylor Lorenz of The New York Times recently reported on a conversation she’d had with a 10-year-old boy who was disappointed that no photos were available when he Googled himself.  The boy felt that he wasn’t a real person until his photo came up in a Google search.  Leaving aside the numerous sociological implications of the tech revolution, the tech sector is under scrutiny as never before.  Its business model of tracking users’ online actions and using the data to sell targeted advertising and feed algorithmic amplification has been described by Harvard professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff as “surveillance capitalism.”  Others call it the “attention economy.”
Continue Reading Hot Topic for 2022: Tech Regulation

Jonathan Cohen, one of my partners at Wilkinson Barker Knauer LLP, has been closely following the incentive auction by which the FCC is looking to clear a significant part of the television band and take that spectrum, slice it up into different size blocks, and resell it to wireless companies.  He has been guiding numerous companies through its complexities. We’ve written much about the auction on these pages, and now Jonathan offers these observations about the auction. – DDO

With the FCC’s Incentive Auction poised to move into its next phase with the August 16th start of active bidding in the forward auction, where companies looking to provide mobile broadband services will bid on licenses carved out of the spectrum vacated by TV broadcasters, we thought it might be helpful to address a few of the myths that seem to be floating around about the auction.

Myth:      In the initial stage of the reverse auction, broadcasters were greedy, demanding that the government pay $86.4 billion for their spectrum.

Reality:   This line of thinking demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the Incentive Auction was designed to work. In each round of the reverse auction, the FCC makes price offers to TV stations, who decide whether or not to accept them. Not the other way around. The FCC decided to set opening price offers at very high levels. The highest opening “go off-air” price offer was $900 million (for a station in New York City), but nine-figure opening offers were plentiful, including to a station in Ottumwa, Iowa (DMA #200). These high prices apparently encouraged a lot of stations to make the initial commitment to accept its opening price offer, which led the FCC to try to clear 126 MHz of spectrum in the initial stage – the most the rules would allow. Under the FCC’s auction design, as prices decline, a TV station can reject the FCC’s offer at any point, but the FCC can continue to reduce its clearing price offers to a station still in the auction only as long as it was still feasible to repack that station given all the other stations that would remain in operation after the auction. At the 126 MHz clearing target, only channels 14-29 are available in the repacked UHF band, and this apparently caused the auction prices for many stations to “freeze” at high levels (once it was determined that a station could no longer be repacked), resulting in the $86.4 billion total clearing cost announced at the end of June. For all we know, however, a great many TV stations that are now possible “winners” in the reverse auction might have been willing to keep accepting price offers below their frozen prices. It was the auction design – freezing station’s buy-out prices when that station could no longer be repacked – that set the prices, not the broadcasters.
Continue Reading Debunking a Few Myths about the FCC’s Incentive Auction