Witnesses Divided Over Draft FCC Reform Bills

The House Communications Subcommittee has posted the testimony of witnesses in the July 11 Federal Communications Commission process reform hearing. The witnesses are split over the issue of whether the current proposed bills solve problems, though not so much on the issue of whether there are some problems to solve.

Analyst Larry Downes, Free State Foundation president Randolph May and former FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell support proposed bills.

A pair of academics on the panel -- Stuart Minor Benjamin of Duke Law School and Richard Pierce from George Washington University Law School -- said they had problems with the current draft legislation. Benjamin said he shared "many of the concerns" that underlie the bills and was particularly sympathetic to streamlining FCC reports. Those bills are ones that would take a host of actions, including imposing shot clocks and putting limits on the FCC's merger review function to only narrowly tailored remedies and a companion bill that would combine FCC reports. But he also said that he had reservations about the main bill, including that they were targeted at the FCC, which undercuts the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), and that it could create the basis for numerous legal challenges. He also argues that the merger review provisions leave the FCC with "little if any role." Pierce was even stronger in his critique. "The addition of twelve mandatory steps to the FCC rulemaking process would be a return to the uncertain, confused, ad hoc world of agency decision making that the Congress wisely and unanimously rejected when it enacted the APA in 1946." He says the new requirements would be extremely burdensome and time consuming.