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| FCC Chairman Kevin Martin Source: Reuters |
WASHINGTON — Is the Federal Communications Commission broken?
That’s the consensus of a long list of opponents who, in the waning days of the Bush administration, have blasted the agency for its slowness, its secrecy and its close ties to corporate interests.
But here at the National Press Club on Monday, several tech policy experts — former FCC commissioners and staffers, consumer advocates and others — joined those critics at an event entitled “Reforming the FCC,” hosted by the digital-rights group Public Knowledge and the Silicon Flatirons Center of the University of Colorado.
Critics have long charged that under the regime of Chairman Kevin Martin, the slow-moving agency has descended under a shroud of secrecy while falling captive to corporate interests.
In a series of panel discussions, participants diagnosed many of the ails they see within the commission as it operates under Martin. At the top of that list are the close ties that many staffers maintain with the industries they oversee.
Often referred to as the “revolving door,” the pattern of moving between private-sector jobs and positions at the FCC has been widely criticized.
“When the interests of the regulator and the regulated entities are so closely intertwined, you have a problem,” said Jessica Rosenworcel, telecom counsel for the Senate Commerce Committee. “I think that [the FCC has] lost sight of its mission.”
Other panelists this morning echoed the recent findings of a Congressional investigation into the way Martin has run the commission since taking the chairmanship in 2005.
One took issue with the so-called “imperial chairmanship” some have accused Martin of installing. William Kennard, himself a former FCC chairman, said that power today is concentrated far too heavily in the office of the chairman. At the same time, other commissioners and the bureau staffs are ignored in favor of the chairman’s agenda.
But to the FCC, those criticisms don’t reflect reality.
“Chairman Martin follows the same policies and procedures that previous FCC chairmen, both Democratic and Republican alike, followed for the past 20 years,” FCC spokesman Robert Kenny told InternetNews.com. “Chairman Martin actually led the recent efforts of the FCC to become more open and transparent by circulating proposed agenda items to the other commissioners three weeks in advance of the monthly meetings, issuing press releases announcing the items to be considered and holding press conferences to publicly release details about those proposals.”
“Chairman Martin was the first chairman of the FCC to put such protocols in place for the benefit of the public,” Kenny said.
Captive to industry?
Still, critics aren’t dissuaded so easily — particularly those who see the FCC as being too beholden to the industries it oversees.
[cob:Special_Report]To Mark Cooper, research director for the Consumer Federation of America, the answer is simple: Staffers should be barred from working in the industries they helped regulate for a certain number of years after leaving the commission.
Cooper said the problem with agencies such as the FCC that are in close contact with the businesses they oversee is one of temptation. As a staffer looking ahead to a career outside of the government, those companies are bright prospects. But taking a hard line on some regulatory matter could threaten their chances for winning a position after they leave the public sector, so pragmatic staffers are tempted to give companies a pass just to keep up friendly relations, he said.
So, he proposes the moratorium.
“[People will say] that interdicts the marketplace. Too bad,” Cooper said. “The public interest here needs to be protected, and the only way to prevent the abuse of the public interest is to put that ban in place.”
Page 2: Is a change in culture needed at the FCC?
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| FCC Chairman Kevin Martin Source: Reuters |
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The increasingly political, captive-to-industry FCC was the main target of a recent article by Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig, who called for abolishing the agency entirely, and replacing it with a new entity whose focus would be to spur innovation. The replacement agency would act as a safeguard against both excessive government regulation and predatory forces of markets that had become monopolies.
This morning’s panelists generally agreed with several of Lessig’s points, but as a practical matter, none seriously advocated the idea of disassembling the agency and building a new one in its stead.
Change in culture?
Severing all ties with the industry, as Cooper suggested, would not satisfy all of the FCC’s critics.
Kennard, who resigned his post as FCC chair on Jan. 19, 2001, one day before Bush took the oath of office, said the FCC’s current operations have taken a toll on morale at the agency and resulted in the departure of some top talent. He also joined others in recalling past eras at the FCC when the commissioners engaged in vigorous debate, and the staffers weren’t afraid to chime in with an opinion.
Critics describe Martin’s regime as one where voicing dissenting opinions can be professionally injurious, and that expert intelligence is often cherrypicked and liberally interpreted to contrive support for one of the chairman’s plans, even as conflicting evidence is overlooked or pushed aside.
“We need an FCC that consciously wants to learn,” said Jonathan Sallet, formerly a senior Commerce Department official in the in the Clinton administration who regularly advised Al Gore on telecommunications issues.
“We don’t often think about governmental agencies in terms of learning,” said Sallet, who is now a partner at the Glover Park Group, a D.C. public relations firm. “But at a time of technological change as swift as we’re seeing now and at a time of such great uncertainty about the future, we need a government agency that wants to learn because no decision it makes today will automatically be the right decision tomorrow.”
Critics would also like to see reforms in the way items are crafted before they come to vote. It is common for the FCC to call for public comment on an item it is considering. But once the comment period ends, the debate over the item’s final form is only getting started, the panelists said. Most of the concessions and substantive changes are made in the final hours before the proposal comes to a vote, and the process is hardly transparent.
The panelists also identified the challenges the commission has had in moving forward with the more difficult and complex issues, such as reform to the Universal Service Fund.
Martin has said that he hoped to bring USF reform before the commission as chairman, but that the other commissioners were dragging their feet. USF reform, along with many of the other thorny issues the FCC faces, tend to get passed from one chairman to the next, Kathleen Abernathy, a former commissioner, said during the panel discussion.
“The harder it gets, the greater the likelihood that you get stalled,” she said.
