Rep Walden, Sen Heller Unveil FCC Process Reform Legislation

Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR), chairman of the House Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, and Sen Dean Heller (R-NV) unveiled legislation to improve the way the Federal Communications Commission operates by improving transparency, predictability, and consistency as part of Republicans’ ongoing effort to ensure the commission’s work encourages job creation, investment, and innovation.

The legislation would:

• Require the Commission to survey the state of the marketplace through a Notice of Inquiry before initiating new rulemakings to ensure the Commission has an up-to-date understanding of the rapidly evolving and job-creating telecommunications marketplace. Require the Commission to identify a market failure, consumer harm, or regulatory barrier to investment before adopting economically significant rules. After identifying such an issue, the Commission must demonstrate that the benefits of regulation outweigh the costs while taking into account the need for regulation to impose the least burden on society.
• Require the Commission to establish performance measures for all program activities so that when the Commission spends hundreds of millions of federal or consumer dollars, Congress and the public have a straightforward means of seeing what bang we’re getting for our buck.
• Apply to the Commission, an independent agency, the regulatory reform principles that President Obama endorsed in his January 2011 Executive Order.
• Prevent regulatory overreach by requiring any conditions imposed on transactions to be within the Commission’s existing authority and be tailored to transaction-specific harms.

Enhance consistency and transparency in the Commission’s operations by requiring the FCC to establish and disclose its own internal procedures for:
o adequate review and deliberation regarding pending orders,
o publication of orders before open meetings,
o initiation of items by bipartisan majorities, and
o minimum public review periods for statistical reports and ex parte communications.

• Require the FCC to establish its own “shot clocks” so that parties know how quickly they can expect action in certain proceedings and provide a schedule for when reports would be released.
• Empower the Commission to operate more efficiently through reform of the “sunshine” rules, allowing a bipartisan majority of Commissioners to meet for collaborative discussions subject to transparency safeguards.
• Consolidate eight, separate congressionally mandated reports on the communications industry into a single comprehensive report with a focus on intermodal competition, deploying communications capabilities to unserved communities, and eliminating regulatory barriers.

Gigi B. Sohn, president and co-founder of Public Knowledge, said: “The result of this legislation … would be to gut the agency and its stated purpose of protecting the public interest. The bills would rewrite the Communications Act, substituting the concepts of private interests, principally large telecommunications companies, for that of the public interest. Nothing in the Communications Act requires that regulations be dependent on failure of markets, or of excessive burdens on industry. While some burdens are inevitable, the protection of the public interest should be paramount. While there are some good features to this bill, including flexibility for commissioners to meet, overall we believe it would be a setback to the agency’s ability to carry out its mission.”