Potential bidders and public interest groups urged the FCC Fri. to keep bidders' identities anonymous in the upcoming 700 MHz auction. By maintaining anonymity, bidders wouldn't be able to signal or use blocking techniques to exclude new entrants from participating in the auction, panelists at a New America Foundation lunch said. The process would help yield a better return to the public for auction of the public licenses.

"Anonymous bidding is the best route," said Greg Rose, economist with the U. of Tex. who has studied the issue for the Media Access Project. It would avoid the prospect of "retaliatory bidding," when bidders act to put pressure on other bidders to sway prices or back out of the auction, he said. The result is that incumbents end up staying in the game, while new entrants don't get a good chance to enter the market. It amounts to a type of "collusive behavior," he said.

Rose released a study saying incumbents manipulated FCC rules to block broadband competition in the FCC's 2006 advanced wireless services auction. He used the study as the basis for his opinion that anonymous bidding is the only auction rule that can prevent collusion by incumbents and other bidders. FCC auction rules were "manipulated to exclude new entrants... from obtaining spectrum in favor in incumbent cable companies, wireless operators and telephone companies which feared the competition those new entrants represented," the study said...

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