The Unpredictable FCC: Politicizing Communications Policy and its Threat to Broadband Investment

[Commentary] Under Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act, the Federal Communications Commission is charged with encouraging “the deployment of advanced telecommunications services to all Americans.” To support the private investment required to fulfill this mandate, all five of the FCC's Commissioners have professed a desire to provide investors with “regulatory certainty.”

Building, maintaining, and upgrading telecommunications networks requires massive and sustained, long-term investments, and uncertainty about regulatory policy that could threaten returns makes firms reluctant to invest. Despite the FCC acknowledging the importance of regulatory certainty to the deployment of modern broadband infrastructure, the reality remains that over the last few years the FCC has become entirely unpredictable, largely, we believe, because of the increased politicization of the agency's deliberative process. Indeed, over the past five years the FCC either has reversed, or is threatening to reverse, some of the most significant bi-partisan deregulatory achievements of the past two decades. This dramatic reversal of FCC policy is a catalyst of uncertainty.

[Ford is the chief economist and Spiwak is the president of the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal and Economic Public Policy Studies]