Summary
1. If “the FCC is broken,” perhaps it needs to be scaled back from its “enormous, wide-ranging authority.”
2. Chairman Jay Rockefeller of the Senate Commerce Committees says, “they will be watching” the FCC.
3. It is really something for these legislators when they are able to gain political cover in shifting so much of their responsibilities to a government agency.
2. Chairman Jay Rockefeller of the Senate Commerce Committees says, “they will be watching” the FCC.
3. It is really something for these legislators when they are able to gain political cover in shifting so much of their responsibilities to a government agency.
Analysis
It is not that the chairman is really critical that the FCC is “ideology-driven.” In the recent past, it has just been the wrong ideology as far as Rockefeller is concerned. It is kind of scary that “[t]here is almost nothing in the world of interconnection and telecommunications and anything you want that the FCC doesn't touch and make basic decisions about.” But it does not stop there. At the nomination hearing for the Chairman of the FCC, Rockefeller even wants “an agency that can think beyond its borders.” The FCC is evidently responsible now “to create jobs” – no doubt that will be particularly government employment.
Rockefeller is extraordinarily generous about what otherwise appears to be a soft job. He states, “I believe that being an FCC commissioner is one of the most daunting, awesome, fearsome, time-consuming, sleep-depriving jobs in Washington, D.C.
Samuel Greenholtz consults with leading institutions through GLG
Analyses are solely the work of the authors and have not been edited or endorsed by GLG.
