REMARKS OF COMMISSIONER NATHAN SIMINGTON TO THE FREE STATE 
        FOUNDATIONS FIFTEENTH ANNIVERSARY GALA LUNCH 
                            OCTOBER 15, 2021 

          Thank you for the kind invitation to join you all here today. It's an honor not just 
    to be here, but to be in such rarefied air.  I am delighted to speak alongside 
    Commissioners Brendan Carr, Mignon Clyburn, and Mike O'Rielly, as well as Deborah 
    Lathen, who was Bureau Chief of the then-Cable Services Bureau, among her other 
    important telecom work. 
     
          It's also a pleasure to join the Free State Foundation for their 15th anniversary. 
    For a decade and a half, the Free State Foundation has served as an important venue at 
    which lawmakers, regulators, and policy professionals from both sides of the aisle, and I 
    imagine sometimes even from an aisle over, have come to hash out ideas related to the 
    free market and limited government.  While those ideas usually have been centered 
    within telecom and technology, the principles within are durable and universal.  I look 
    forward to speaking with those with whom I share an opinion, and more importantly 
    those with whom I disagree, at many Free State Foundation events to come. 
     
    As some of you may know, I selected Free State Foundation for my maiden address.  In 
    that address, I remarked on the 25th anniversary of the Telecom Act of 1996 and the 
    fulfillment of the promise of the deregulatory era.  I was cautioned by some that there 
    would be incumbent interests within telecom who took umbrage with the sentiments I 
    expressed supporting the Act in that speech.  Now, with almost a year on the Commission 
    in the rear view, I understand that it is probably not possible to utter a sentence for which 
    it is not true that a vital and thoroughly informed interest in telecom will object.  I'm sure 
    if I came out today in support of chocolate ice cream, I'd be hearing from the vanilla 
    lobby in due course with a PowerPoint on the importance of vanilla beans to the economy 
    of Madagascar.  And so I've concluded to be a bit Zen about the process--to learn what I 
    need to but forget the rest. 
     
    And good thing, because nowadays I'm talking about receiver standards. And, 
    predictably, I have ruffled a few feathers. 
    
   I hear from some corners that building better receivers is an expense.  Well, true. Guard 
   bands are an expense, too. Interference due to intermodulation and spurious emission are 
   expenses.  Every digital bit beneath the Shannon limit is an expense.  Operating our 
   wireless future on the back of cheap edge devices that are sensitive to interference in an 
   increasingly spectrally dense mid-band environment will be a potentially very large 
   expense when those devices fail.  I don't know quite how big, but I am willing to bet it is 
   smaller than the expense of the implementation of receiver standards. 
    
   I hear from some other corners that building better receivers stifles innovation. Many of 
   those same players serve incumbents in the federal bands, and I'm not sure that they've 
   made the same case to the NTIA regarding federal receiver standards, though it's always 
   been available for them to make.  Naturally, I'm skeptical that the bare existence of 
   standards for minimum receiver performance are likely to stifle innovation.  But here's 

 one thing about which I'm not skeptical.  It's, at present, easier to build a cheap wireless 
 device, with poor receiver performance, in China than it is here.  What happens when the 
 industry implements better receiver standards?  Do consumers pay a bit more?  Possibly. 
 But do we also apply pressure to Chinese manufacturers, potentially making it feasible 
 for non-Chinese manufacturers to compete to make higher quality devices with better 
 components?  Perhaps some domestically?  That sounds, to me, like it'd have a protective 
 effect on innovation, actually.  And, at a minimum, it would mitigate some of the 
 dominance of Chinese manufacturers in the domestic market. 
  
 I hear from still some other corners—at this point I'm not sure just how big this polygon 
 is—that it is beyond the ken of the Commission's powers to regulate receivers.  That the 
 Commission effectively regulates transmit only.  Well, I tend to think that our regulations 
 are not simplex.  We don't merely regulate transmissions.  We regulate reception too—
 logically, we have to, because interference as experienced by an end user or device takes 
 place in a single transmission-reception process.  Traditionally we haven't focused on 
 receivers, but that doesn't mean that we face an absolute bar.  I think the Commission 
 agreed to that in a task force in 2002, and Commissioners and Chairs since have come out 
 in support.  There may be reasons that we have yet to act, but those reasons are not about 
 ambiguity over our regulatory authority. 
  
 Of course, I am at the Free State Foundation, and I didn’t come here to argue for an 
 overbearing, arbitrary Commission ukase on this subject.  I hope the Commission doesn't 
 ultimately regulate receivers.  I suspect that the standards bodies and trade associations 
 are in a better position than the Commission to project likely problems and anticipate 
 them without fear of a heckler's veto from the most marginal actors.  I'm sure the 
 Commission staff would not thank the 8th floor for handing them the massive headache 
of writing regulations covering innumerable, highly disparate device models and use 
cases.  Our best bet is to serve as a clearinghouse to encourage industry coordination and 
autoregulation.  But I do think that the specter of regulation, from time to time, must 
loom in order to help industry act; eventually, either this issue will be solved, or the 
Commission's hand will be forced by public opinion, which is not the best way to get 
 nuanced, thoughtful, capacious regulation.  And so, for the good of the American people 
 and to deliver on the promise of our wireless future, we must raise the question with 
 industry. 
  
 Thank you again to Randy for the kind invitation to attend today.