FCC Web Site Showing Age, Visitors Say
Government, industry and other officials are pushing for an overhaul of the FCC Web site. It got top honors in a 2002 Brown University report on federal Web sites, but hasn’t received a significant make-over since. With a fresh government focus on transparency, and techie Julius Genachowski expected to take the FCC’s helm, many believe the site might finally see an overhaul. “The site is an embarrassment right now” for the Web-savvy administration of President Barack Obama, said Jerry Brito of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
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Citing a need for greater transparency at the FCC, Acting Chairman Michael Copps and Commissioner Robert McDowell have led the call for a revamp. Last week, Copps told FCC staff that the site “has a wealth of resources,” but “much of it is, unfortunately, difficult to locate and even more difficult to use.” An overhaul probably won’t be complete until the FCC gets a new chairperson, but Copps plans to prioritize upgrading the DTV page, he said.
“I agree with anyone who says the FCC Web site is not consumer friendly,” McDowell said in an interview Wednesday. He pitched some ideas earlier this week at an FCBA lunch (CD Feb 3 p1). He wants the FCC to start a “formal process” to seek improvements and “cast the net as widely as possible to harvest as many ideas as we can find,” he added. “At this stage I think just about all ideas are good ideas, and sparking this kind of brainstorming and discussion is precisely the goal I had in mind.”
The FCC must make its Web site more accessible to people who aren’t lawyers or executives, said six members of the panel advising the commission on consumer issues. They all said the Web site needs improvement. Benton Foundation Chairman Charles Benton called fcc.gov “a great tool for lobbyists.” Now it “needs to become a tool of the people.”
“The FCC Web site is very difficult to search,” even for those who get paid to peruse it, said a competitive local exchange carrier official. “There are various e-filing sites, and each one of them is searched using a different way.” Boolean searches “don’t work on any of them,” the source added. Several telecom officials said the Electronic Comment Filing System should be searchable by keyword, so that, for example, visitors can search for all filings mentioning “TELRIC.”
ECFS was last updated Dec. 11, 2003, according to the FCC Web site. Five years is “forever” in the Internet world, and it shows, said Brito. Today, a mother in California wanting to learn the latest on children’s programming issues would not be able to do so on the FCC site without knowing the right docket number, he said. It’s “always been a very difficult process” for a consumer to find a document at fcc.gov, said Debra Berlyn, chairman of the agency’s consumer advisory panel. It may look at how to improve the site once it’s done dealing with the DTV transition, she and other members said.
Some visitors to the FCC’s site abort plans to file comments or complaints because they can’t figure out how to do so, said consumer advisory panelists. Docket numbers of all proceedings and more-specific details of all items circulating among commissioners should be prominently featured, they said. “If you don’t have the number of the docket and you want to comment, you are dead, because there is no way you are going to find it,” said Nixyvette Santini, a commissioner on the Puerto Rico Telecommunications Regulatory Board.
The FCC should bring the site’s “usability up to modern standards,” said Public Knowledge spokesman Art Brodsky. All FCC documents should be machine-readable so their full text can be searched, he said. And the FCC’s document databases should be accessible by external Web sites and search engines, he said. The FCC site currently blocks indexing by Google and other search engines via a “Robots.txt” file contained on the site, Brito said. Even if the FCC removed the file, indexing would be tough because the Web site is database-driven and contains no site map, he said.
Several officials suggested tidying up the site’s navigation. “Every bureau and office’s Web site is set up differently, [and] there is no consistency between various parts of the Web site across different groups,” complained the CLEC official. Another wireline official suggested that public notices seeking comment include hyperlinks back to the petitions they're based upon.
The FCC should add more tools for keeping current on agency business, some said. The FCC would do well to follow the example of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Web site, said attorneys at one firm. That site allows users to subscribe to RSS news feeds through Google Reader and other aggregators, and features an “eSubscription” service for tracking new filings made in selected dockets, they said.
The site should embrace Web 2.0 techniques, said former FCC attorney Jonathan Askin, now an associate professor at Brooklyn Law School. Upping interactivity and including a community-building application would promote public participation in government, he said. The site should permit anyone with interest in FCC issues to easily submit ideas and comments, and enable the FCC to more rapidly and directly send its proposals and other documents to the public, he said. To enhance internal collaboration among FCC staff, the agency should implement advanced wiki tools, he said. Currently, individual bureaus rarely know what other bureaus are doing, he said.
Some federal agencies have effectively implemented modern Web standards, Brito said. The SEC “is doing amazing things with usable data feeds,” and Brito likes how the Copyright Office presents data, he said. Generally speaking, however, “federal sites are pretty bad.”