Right Time to Change FCC Structure, Says AEI's Howell
“The time is right” to consider fundamental changes to the FCC's structure, said Bronwyn Howell, American Enterprise Institute visiting fellow, in a blog post endorsing Trump transition team member Mark Jamison's proposal to change the commission's operations. Jamison is also…
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a scholar affiliated with AEI, and proposed replacing the wireline and wireless bureaus with bureaus of economics, engineering, competition and consumer protection (see 1702020029). The FCC's current structure is an artifact of an earlier time, ”building upon regulations developed for railways and postal services,” Howell said. A reorganization would allow the commission to shift to monitoring the industry as an “ecosystem” where “the performance at specific points of the ecosystem is monitored, and behaviors are adjusted retrospectively based on need,” Howell said. “In the former, systems are designed with large levers to be pulled that can fundamentally alter the structural arrangements of regulated industries, while the latter can be characterized as multiple ‘regulators’ scattered throughout a complex system,” Howell said. “The proposed structure takes account of the profound changes that have taken place as technological convergence has brought all of telecommunications, broadcasting, and data transport onto a common digital platform, and customers’ experiences have come to be mediated primarily through the applications they use rather than the underlying network technologies that support them.”