WASHINGTON-The Federal Communications Commission should focus on spectrum property rights, and if it does its job right, it will put itself out of a job, said James Miller, chairman of the CapAnalysis Group L.L.C. Miller is the former director of the Office of Management & Budget and former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission.
“This legislation really ought to direct the FCC, the Department of Commerce and the Department of Justice to engage in property-rights reform-property rights of the use of frequencies, not determining the rules of competition, let alone determining outcomes. So much of the regulatory process is directed at who gets what in terms of competitive outcomes, and that is not what the FCC should be involved in. The FCC should be involved in defining property rights. If it does it appropriately it will all but work itself out of a job,” said Miller at a press conference Tuesday sponsored by the Progress & Freedom Foundation.
PFF is leading an effort to write a replacement for the Communications Act to be known as the Digital Age Communications Act.
“One might ask whether a bottom-up rewrite of communications law is advisable, or even prudent,” said Randolph May, PFF senior fellow and director of communications policy studies. “We believe that the transformation of the communications sector, from analog to digital from circuits to packets, from monopolistic platforms to multiple platforms, warrants consideration as a whole.”
PFF expects to present a draft bill to Capitol Hill later this year.
“There is but one ideological premise to this undertaking that the nation’s communications laws, policies and institutions are in need of reform. The participants in this effort hail from across the political spectrum, and they have agreed to come together to try and form consensus positions about proper reform. We start with no presuppositions except that reform is necessary, and have no predetermined outcomes,” said PFF President Ray Gifford.
The PFF initiative is a set of five working groups dealing with spectrum policy, regulatory framework, institutional reform, universal service/social policy and the federal/state framework. The spectrum policy working group will be chaired by Lawrence White, professor of economics at New York University, and Thomas Lenard, PFF senior fellow and vice president of research. Other members of the spectrum policy working group include Dale Hatfield, former chief of the FCC’s Office of Engineering & Technology and now a professor at the University of Colorado, and Thomas Hazlett, former FCC economist and now senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
