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Reboot the FCC
We'll stifle the Skypes and YouTubes of the future if we don't demolish the regulators that oversee our digital pipelines.
Lawrence Lessig
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Economic growth requires innovation. Trouble is, Washington is practically designed to resist it. Built into the DNA of the most important agencies created to protect innovation, is an almost irresistible urge to protect the most powerful instead.
The FCC is a perfect example. Born in the 1930s, at a time when the utmost importance was put on stability, the agency has become the focal point for almost every important innovation in technology. It is the presumptive protector of the Internet, and the continued regulator of radio, TV and satellite communications. In the next decades, it could well become the default regulator for every new communications technology, including, and especially, fantastic new ways to use wireless technologies, which today carry television, radio, internet, and cellular phone signals through the air, and which may soon provide high-speed internet access on-the-go, something that Google cofounder Larry Page calls "wifi on steroids."
If history is our guide, these new technologies are at risk, and with them, everything they make possible. With so much in its reach, the FCC has become the target of enormous campaigns for influence. Its commissioners are meant to be "expert" and "independent," but they've never really been expert, and are now openly embracing the political role they play. Commissioners issue press releases touting their own personal policies. And lobbyists spend years getting close to members of this junior varsity Congress. Think about the storm around former FCC Chairman Michael Powell's decision to relax media ownership rules, giving a green light to the concentration of newspapers and television stations into fewer and fewer hands. This is policy by committee, influenced by money and power, and with no one, not even the President, responsible for its failures.
The solution here is not tinkering. You can't fix DNA. You have to bury it. President Obama should get Congress to shut down the FCC and similar vestigial regulators, which put stability and special interests above the public good. In their place, Congress should create something we could call the Innovation Environment Protection Agency (iEPA), charged with a simple founding mission: "minimal intervention to maximize innovation." The iEPA's core purpose would be to protect innovation from its two historical enemiesexcessive government favors, and excessive private monopoly power....
WOW, they're actually calling for the removal of a regulatory agency?
and not offering another government controled fix
i'm totally shocked
That's what I was thinking. Aren't these the same idiots that were bitching about "deregulation"?
Deregulate control on ideas and communications. Regulate hidden commercial transactions that have the ability to bring down the whole economy.
thank you and same to you. the FCC does much more than regulate tv/radio/POTS. to abolish it would be a serious mistake, IMO.
Granted it's an op-ed, I'm still shocked they ran it:
Lessig: It's Time to Demolish the FCC | Newsweek Technology | Newsweek.com
Why? BTW, can we get that warning off my site, I didn't do anything wrong.
That is not true.Why?
maybe because a market unregulated has always bit the public in the ass?
That is not true.
That is quite an interesting twist of subject and concession.really?
true not ALL markets are regulated. but some need to be.
That is quite an interesting twist of subject and concession.
-from some web siteWCRWII.gif (222731 bytes)It is ironic that corporate libertarians regularly pay homage to Adam Smith as their intellectual patron saint, since it is obvious to even the most casual reader of his epic work The Wealth of Nations that Smith would have vigorously opposed most of their claims and policy positions. For example, corporate libertarians fervently oppose any restraint on corporate size or power. Smith, on the other hand, opposed any form of economic concentration on the ground that it distorts the market's natural ability to establish a price that provides a fair return on land, labor, and capital; to produce a satisfactory outcome for both buyers and sellers; and to optimally allocate society's resources.
This market was not free, or true. It was tainted.certain markets need to be regulated for the good of the nation. a market that is free of regulation that hurts the public is of what value to us? free markets are not always free.
