A Regulatory Fairytale for the 21st Century

Royal Regulator vows to end the plague of Bureaucracy and Government Interference afflicting the land, set the citizens—and their telecom providers—free.

by Patricia Fusco ISP-Planet Managing Editor [August 19, 1999]

Once upon a time, there was a federal agency in charge of regulating the entire communications industry in the United States.

Born from a land of wire-mongering monopolistic tyrants, the Federal Communications Commission worked to free an oppressed nation from corporate totalitarianism and serve the public good.

Having been ruled by a long dynasty of princes since its inception, the agency found itself bogged down in a 65-year-old quagmire of outdated regulations. The kingdom was edging near ruin and decay due to departmental redundancies, mountainous paperwork, and tortoise-like decision making.

New blood
Young Prince William E. Kennard took it upon himself to lead the FCC into the hereafter of converging communications technologies and break through the slough of bureaucratic impediments to the sweet land of efficiency and quality.

One day, the Prince took a walk up Capitol Hill. While there, he delivered a draft plan to Congress that would restructure the entire kingdom. The prince called his dream "A New FCC for the 21st Century."

In order to prepare for the five-year project, the Prince spent months soliciting the opinions of his minions. He asked consumer groups, industry leaders, state and local governments, the academic community, and FCC employees how the kingdom should be run.

Camelot vision
Prince Kennard said the overhaul would allow the FCC to quickly respond to emerging technologies and prepare for a time when competitive forces alone would regulate new standards for the entire communications industry.

The Prince envisioned a day when all U.S. communications markets would be driven by vigorous competitive forces. Companies would play fairly among themselves in search of market share and profit. Consumers would be empowered by the right to freely choose from a wide variety of communications options. The Prince believed that competition would greatly reduce the need for direct regulation from the FCC.

Ever mindful of the fate of other deregulated kingdoms, Prince Kennard was quick to remind Congress that the FCC's prime directorate would remain the same as ever:

~The FCC shall work to promote
competition in communications, protect consumers,
and support universal access.~

Entrenched aristocracy
Industry insiders secretly wondered if the Prince had the internal resolve to carry out real changes within the agency, or if this was simply a futile exercise of reconstruction in honor of the approaching millennium.

The Prince believed that his plan was well rooted in law. After all, the 1996 Telecommunications Act gave the FCC the authority to drop rules and regulations as they became unnecessary. The Commission quickly followed the Prince's lead and voted to relax rules barring a company from owning two television stations in a single market.

Meanwhile, the Prince created two new bureaus to oversee enforcement and public information. At the same time, the Prince worked to combine the agency's four separate units, currently scattered among the bureaus.

Taxpayers everywhere cheered when the agency announced that the plan would focus on their needs, while policing the industry to make sure companies take good care of their customers' needs and desires.

Big companies were sad to lose a federal agency that they had come to think of as a special friend and partner in their business ventures.

Withering away?
Soon, the agency only worked to oversee Spectrum Licensing and Policy, while the Prince built a new office of Engineering and Technology to get a handle on convergence.

The agency retained its controversial authority to approve or deny telecommunications mergers for a little while. But eventually, the big bad Department of Justice assumed full power of merger and acquisition oversight in order to serve the public interest.

Understanding that it may be tricky to coordinate the work of the policy makers who created the rules and the enforcers who executed the laws, both Congress and the Prince recognized that there was only so much the kingdom could do to realize the dream of self-reorganization.

Entrenched bureaucracy
Everyone began to understand that the task of getting the agency's rank and file members to truly re-examine their role was impossible. Like most federal agencies, the FCC staff did not readily embrace changes in their workplace.

The Prince was overheard to observe that the task was like trying to rebuild a 747 while in flight. The Digital Age had forced the Prince to try and find a way to streamline licensing activities, accelerate decision making, and create instant online rulings.

Eventually, instead of making real adjustments to how the kingdom worked, the Prince simply renamed the same tired old bureaus with new names and hoped that no one would notice that things had not really changed at the agency. He calculated that by delivering no new guidelines on access to cable networks, his agency would be as effective as if they had publicly put a national policy in place.

Congress could no longer bear to see the Prince and his people suffer through the stress and strain of deregulation. That's when the benevolent Canons of Capitol Hill stepped in to implement fundamental changes at the FCC. Eventually the entire infrastructure of the kingdom was gutted like a fish.

Operation a success?
Industry analysts watched aghast as the agency took its last gasps of air, floundering in the chaos of re-regulation it had created.

Early in the new millennium Congress gathered to put forth-new telecommunications legislation that abolished the kingdom of the FCC and replaced it with an IBM-maintained super computer.

Working from his plush new palace nestled deep within the Realm of Gates, the federal regulator formerly known as Prince Kennard diligently reads, reviews, and request comments about correspondence from erstwhile lawyers that still hold him in the highest regard to this day. And here, he will doubtless live happily ever after.

—End