FCC Proposes to End 1,000-1,500 Dormant Proceedings

[Commentary] In February, 2010, the Federal Communications Commission issued a low-profile Notice of Proposed Rulemaking addressing a number of procedural issues of seemingly minor interest. In a section titled “Management of Dockets”, the FCC observed that it has more than 3,000 open dockets on its books, many of which “have seen little or no activity in years.” The FCC proposed to authorize its Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau (CGB) to “review all open dockets”, identify “candidate[s] for termination”, consult with the relevant Bureaus and then, WHACK, pull the plug on dockets in which, for example, “no further action is required or contemplated.”

After the FCC adopted that proposal, the CGB has released for comment its initial list of “dormant proceedings” which, absent objection, will be summarily flushed down the tubes in a couple of months. That list is set out in a 97-page table containing more than 1,000 separate line entries. When you dig into them (see below for how you can do this – the process is not as simple as you might think), you find that a fair number of those individual line entries in turn contain as many as 30 or 40 separate and distinct items. From a casual back-of-the-hand calculation, we'd say that CGB is proposing to dump somewhere close to 1,500 separate and distinct proceedings. So the FCC could be relieving itself of up to half of its open dockets with little more than a single perfunctory notice.

It’s possible, of course, that all of the proceedings on CGB’s Goner List have been abandoned by their proponents and can, therefore, be put out of their misery. But without considerable effort, it would be impossible to confirm that. Bottom line: if you filed a petition for rulemaking at any time between, say, 1991 and 2004, and you think you might like to keep it alive, you'd do well to spend some time with CGB’s list.