A Strategic Plan for the FCC: The Future Ain't What it Used to Be

[Commentary] Is the Federal Communications Commission’s expert staff of engineers, economics, and legal experts being manipulated or overruled to support a political agenda?

Unfortunately, that appears to be the inescapable explanation for at least some of the agency’s strange behavior. But something deeper and more disturbing is happening. The agency has many opportunities to stray, largely because, when it comes to broadband and the Internet revolution more generally, the FCC has no playbook to work from. The Commission, quite simply, has lost the ability to keep up with the remarkable pace of innovation in communications technology – the same technology whose deployment the FCC was created to facilitate. Congress is partly to blame. It last made significant changes to the agency’s charter in 1996, well before the Internet revolution reshaped the landscape of telephone, radio, television, and mobile communications. Those innovations, which have spawned an almost magical new world of information interactions for U.S. consumers, also render obsolete much of the agency’s governing law. The failure of communications law to keep up—perhaps inevitably, given the high-speed pace of technological innovation–has undermined the agency’s ability to pursue its prime directive to “make available…rapid, efficient, Nation-wide, and world-wide wire and radio communication services with adequate facilities at reasonable charges.” Everything from the FCC’s organization chart to its management paradigm for allocating radio spectrum has mutated into perilous anachronisms.