O'Rielly Lambasts Enforcement Bureau, Lauds Pai at NAB 2017
LAS VEGAS -- The FCC is handling poorly its responsibility to police the radio spectrum, its siloed internal structure should be reorganized, and outdated regulatory burdens for broadcasters should be “junked,” said Commissioner Mike O'Rielly in a speech at the NAB Show Monday. The speech preceded a panel on whether the FCC should be dismantled and O'Rielly bashed the prior commission while heaping praise on current Chairman Ajit Pai. “It wasn’t until the Obama administration that the independence of the agency was effectively eviscerated,” O'Rielly said, saying with Pai's leadership, the case for keeping the FCC is stronger. Pai could be “the catalyst for the regulatory golden age,” O'Rielly said.
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An independent regulatory agency has value, but that value doesn't apply if the FCC's independence has been compromised, O'Rielly said. The commission's siloed organizational structure “no longer makes sense as it pertains to the commercial marketplace it oversees,” he said.
The FCC “is not sufficiently able or willing to properly police radio spectrum,” O'Rielly said. He slammed the Enforcement Bureau for not pursuing pirate radio stations. “Additional attention should be spent on this core problem, instead of pursuing the past administration's projects,” O'Rielly said. Enforcement Bureau field office staff is “demoralized” though the bureau's front office has expanded, O'Rielly said. The state of the bureau “is most certainly not the fault of our new chairman and his team.” The FCC and the Enforcement Bureau didn't comment.
One reason the FCC shouldn't be dissolved is that it's efficient to have staffers in the same place who understand the technical matters the FCC works with, said the panelists who followed O'Rielly's speech. “There isn't another agency with expertise in the physics of radio waves,” said Quadra Partners co-founder Paul de Sa, former chief of the FCC's Office of Strategic Planning. ”There's a reason why every country in the world has a centralized telecom regulator."
The FCC's operations also cause inefficiencies, such as when it regulates similarly situated entities differently from each other, said Pepperdine University associate law professor Babette Boliek. The panelists cited the FCC's imposition of merger conditions as an example. If the special rules that companies accept in order to have their deals approved are in the public interest, then the FCC should make and apply those rules equally, Boliek said.
Scrapping the FCC has been discussed throughout his career but has never happened, said former FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell. Doing so “would take a massive reorganization,” he said.