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May Publishes "To Do" List in International Journal
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The Federal Communications Commission under the Bush Administration may have been slow out of the starting gate, but Progress & Freedom Foundation Senior Fellow Randolph J. May is optimistic the agency is finally ready to consider a more deregulatory agenda. Towards that end, May, a former FCC official and current Director of Communications Policy Studies at the Foundation, has supplied the agency with a “to do” list.
In an article just published in “info”, an international journal concerned with the economic, social, political and regulatory aspects of the emerging tele-information economy, May sets forth his vision of a reform agenda for the FCC, listing a number of initiatives: Establish a technology-neutral deregulatory regime for broadband services; reduce excessive forced sharing requirements on communications networks; limit the scope of the ‘public interest’ doctrine; and establish an economically efficient regime for inter-carrier compensation.
May’s article, “A Reform Agenda For the FCC,” is a revised version of a paper released by PFF in May 2001. At that time, he wrote: “While the FCC may be credited for starting down the road towards meeting the [1996] Act’s objective of promoting competition and reducing regulation in all telecommunications markets, there is much more for a reform-minded commission to do. With the tech sector experiencing a serious slump in the financial markets which threatens to curtail investment in new facilities and services, a new push to implement further deregulation of the telecommunications markets could help spur a revival of this most important sector of the economy.”
Now, almost a year later, May sees signs of progress toward a deregulatory agenda: “Perhaps most importantly,” he writes, “the Commission has now put out for comment proposals which, if adopted, would enable it to implement the first two priorities I identified last year—the establishment of a uniform deregulatory regime for broadband and a reduction of excessive network sharing requirements.” And, he adds, “it shouldn’t wait too long to cabin the scope of its wide-ranging public interest reviews, for example, in the merger area, and to overhaul its uneconomic inter-carrier compensation policies.”
The Progress & Freedom Foundation is a market-oriented think tank that studies the digital revolution and its implications for public policy. It is a 501(c)(3) research & educational organization.
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