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  1. #1
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    The bill, H.R. 3309, is called the “FCC Process Reform Act of 2011.”

    As Rep. Henry Waxman, the Ranking Member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee makes clear, the bill will disable the FCC, not reform it.

    It does this by creating a special set of vague and novel procedural hurdles for the FCC to which no other agency is subject and that will require another decade of litigation to clarify. It does this by significantly reducing the FCC’s ability to take the public interest into account when considering mergers. And it provides innumerable additional routes for mischievous litigation, making every single one of the FCC’s regulatory analyses in support of a new rule — and not just the rule itself — subject to judicial review. Don’t like the FCC’s suggestion that public interest values are worth taking into account? Sue, and paralyze the Commission.

    To be sure, it’s a job-creation bill. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that twenty additional government employees will be needed to handle the new rulemaking and reporting requirements of the legislation, at a cost of $26 million between 2013 and 2017. And the bill will trigger lots of lobbyist hours as everyone scrambles to figure out what the heck it means.

    Although the bill’s proponents say they aim to make things work more quickly at the FCC, the legislation will have the opposite effect: it will make it very difficult for the FCC to deal with any of the real-time telecom problems the country faces. What the Republicans seem to want, at bottom, is to grant the giant companies that sell us basic communications capacity — an essential utility for the 21st century — the ability to throw sand in the works at every opportunity.


    http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/...wford-gut-fcc/

  2. #2
    Veteran EVAY's Avatar
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    The bill, H.R. 3309, is called the “FCC Process Reform Act of 2011.”

    As Rep. Henry Waxman, the Ranking Member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee makes clear, the bill will disable the FCC, not reform it.

    It does this by creating a special set of vague and novel procedural hurdles for the FCC to which no other agency is subject and that will require another decade of litigation to clarify. It does this by significantly reducing the FCC’s ability to take the public interest into account when considering mergers. And it provides innumerable additional routes for mischievous litigation, making every single one of the FCC’s regulatory analyses in support of a new rule — and not just the rule itself — subject to judicial review. Don’t like the FCC’s suggestion that public interest values are worth taking into account? Sue, and paralyze the Commission.


    To be sure, it’s a job-creation bill. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that twenty additional government employees will be needed to handle the new rulemaking and reporting requirements of the legislation, at a cost of $26 million between 2013 and 2017. And the bill will trigger lots of lobbyist hours as everyone scrambles to figure out what the heck it means.

    Although the bill’s proponents say they aim to make things work more quickly at the FCC, the legislation will have the opposite effect: it will make it very difficult for the FCC to deal with any of the real-time telecom problems the country faces. What the Republicans seem to want, at bottom, is to grant the giant companies that sell us basic communications capacity — an essential utility for the 21st century — the ability to throw sand in the works at every opportunity.


    http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/...wford-gut-fcc/
    Sounds like AT&T's revenge for the failure of the AT&T- T-Mobile merger.

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