How Trump and promise of FCC reform are already spurring economic growth

[Commentary] The unexpected presidential election of a very successful builder and value creator determined to spur economic and employment growth, coupled with a reelected Republican-controlled Congress, has already created significant growth opportunity by signaling a completely new business and investment environment for industry regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. This change in business outlook is as different as night and day.

As a result, these forward-looking companies are already putting into motion new investments in infrastructure and growth opportunities that will create jobs. First, for the next four years starting Jan. 20, the FCC will shift from being extremely regulatory and openly hostile to private investment in infrastructure and proprietary content creation, to being highly deregulatory and supportive of private investment, and value and job creation. Second, Republican FCC commissioners were vehemently opposed to the FCC’s creation of an un-bounded Title II “Standard for Future Conduct” that has empowered FCC enforcement staff to unilaterally make up new rules of the game as they go along and play “gotcha-enforcement” after-the-fact. Third, in the months ahead, a comprehensive tax reform package is expected to pass into law that will lower America’s corporate tax rates from 35 percent to roughly 15 percent. This is one of the most pro-growth, pro-investment, pro-employment, policies any new government could enact. Finally, concerning merger review, the Republican FCC commissioners, and Republicans in general, believe that the FCC has abused its unbounded and unpredictable public interest test in the FCC’s redundant merger review process; and that the FCC was wrong in administratively whipsawing established antitrust precedent in high-fixed cost industries like communications from three market competitors required, to four – after the fact.

[Cleland is president of Precursor LLC, a consultancy for Fortune 500 companies, and chairman of NetCompetition, a pro-competition e-forum supported by broadband interests]