Remarks of FCC Commissioner Michael O'Rielly Before the Prosperity Caucus

I thought I would use this valuable platform to talk about a couple of issues relevant to the communications worlds that you may find of interest:

Economic Freedom: Federal Communications Commission staff should not advocate for local governments, like cities and towns, to enter the marketplace by creating communications services to directly compete with private companies. Such a practice should be characterized for what it is: borderline socialism. Championing economic freedom is my guiding principle when it comes to overseeing the communications industry.

Cost-Benefit Analysis: The FCC is unwilling to conduct and consider proper cost-benefit analysis. Many of you are in the economic field in one capacity or another, and the FCC desperately needs to be challenged on all of its cost-benefit analysis assumptions and underlying work. Whether it is you or someone you know, please be willing to consider taking up the mantle and critiquing the FCC’s work, either as a whole or on an individual item basis. In addition, we need private economists to file their own analyses in our proceedings.

FCC Economists: We have a lot more lawyers than economists. While the FCC has a number of economists and probably even some this crowd might find philosophically acceptable, staffing levels are regularly found to be insufficient for FCC tasks, a sure sign of misplaced priorities.