It's a great question. I think in many ways it represents one of the best opportunities we have to change some of the competitive dynamics.
I guess I'd point to at least a couple of issues. First off, I think we need another set-aside, ensuring that either new entrants, or entrants that only have a very small percentage of the market, have a certain amount of that spectrum exclusively for their bidding. The reason is that the incumbents, the large players right now, have an incentive to keep those new players out of the marketplace. They're willing to overbid for the spectrum, not because it makes business sense to pay so much for the spectrum but because it makes business sense to keep some competitors out of the marketplace. A set-aside similar to what we had a couple of years ago makes a huge amount of sense.
Secondly, as alluded to for some of the questions from Mr. Lake, I think along with a set-aside we need to open up the competition to foreign investors as well. This strikes me as a perfect opportunity to try to do that, so it's a set-aside plus the ability for foreign bidders.
Thirdly, and I think this is important, there is going to be a significant digital dividend that comes out of spectrum previously used for analog television that's now being freed up; we're talking potentially about billions of dollars. The last time we had a spectrum auction, those billions of dollars went to the automotive sector. It was understandable: the sector needed it.
This represents a real opportunity to reinvest what is spent on that spectrum auction into these digital issues: ensuring we've got universal affordable broadband, helping to fund some of the culture and creativity we've talked about, and funding some of the digital literacy and digital skills that people have been talking about.
We all know that things are tight right now. That reinvestment not only provides a large amount of money to be able to do that, but it perhaps makes it more palatable for the companies that are making the bids to begin with; they know that much of what they're spending is in a sense being recycled back into the sector by way of some things that are currently underfunded.