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Important Links. The Court relied on its earlier argument that the "scarcity" of radio licenses necessitated extensive government control, including requiring the provision of time to political opponents. That case silenced Kennedy critics, of course, who could not afford an FCC inquiry and possible license revocation. It also lead to other FCC-initiated speech infringements, like regulating broadcast advertisements for cigarettes, and it serves as the justification for non-economic regulation of media companies today.
The scholarly response to Red Lion has been deservedly harsh. In the late s, for instance, most cities had dozens of radio stations but only one or two daily newspapers, yet the paucity of newspaper outlets did not and does not permit government control of content.
The Ninth Circuit concluded that even a newspaper with a "substantial monopoly" cannot be compelled to run an advertisement it does not wish to publish. In fact, a few years after Red Lion , the Supreme Court decided a case with very similar facts, except the regulation at issue mandated a newspaper allow a right of reply when that newspaper endorsed one politician over another. The Court held that law unconstitutional, thus setting up an obvious schism between treatment of electronic media outlets like broadcast radio and print outlets.
Though ostensibly content-neutral, regulating internet architecture, cable television, and spectrum licenses is done for the express purpose of shaping culture and media in ways Red Lion defenders intended. Media law professor Laurence Winer points out that "'bottleneck control' quickly is becoming the talisman for cable that spectrum scarcity once was for broadcasting.
Scholars in recent years have been laying the groundwork to give lesser First Amendment protections to internet intermediaries like Google, Comcast, Twitter, and Facebook. There are even rumblings from prominent progressives that the politicization of news is a problem requiring FCC remedy. Cass Sunstein, for instance, bemoans that "many of us No matter how abundant competition and media outlets become, history shows the FCC will never voluntarily abandon the field, nor will media activists relent.
Further, the FCC has the benefit of bringing about the very circumstances that necessitate its control of distribution. As Christopher Yoo has pointed out, because "the amount of spectrum available Structural regulation and architectural censorship, then, is a self-reinforcing problem that threatens some basic American values about free speech.
While conservatives are critical of the FCC and its processes, progressives have raised their own concerns about it, which indicates there may be room for scaling back the FCC's responsibilities. The FCC's industrial planning hurts conservatives by concealing the true size of government, particularly the industries that the FCC shapes and supports. FCC policies also harm progressives by creating, in Teles's words, both the perception and the reality that the government is incompetent and corrupt.
Echoing many conservative complaints, he concluded that, when it comes to technology, there's an urgent need to "remove the government from the mix as much as possible. An effective reform of communications policy should have two parts: targeted, transparent subsidies, and the deletion of reams of communications statutes that attempt, ineffectually, to benefit consumers while giving policymakers a carte blanche to regulate as they please. Lawmakers want to avoid the appearance of increasing government spending, so their public-minded policies are implemented in complex and costly off-budget agency rules.
Because of this, programs whose ends could be accomplished with relatively small direct expenditures become large indirect subsidies. Take local news programming as an example. A huge television-regulation edifice relies on maintaining a nationwide system of free over-the-air television and local news content.
The costs to society are tremendous. Other costs, in terms of less broadband access and television competition and diverted FCC attention, are substantial but not amenable to calculation. If members of Congress want localism, they should fund local journalism directly. Parts of the spectrum worth billions of dollars should not have been parceled out for free, with strings attached, to what is simply one of several distribution channels.
Likewise, if Congress wants diverse sources of news and entertainment and children's programming, they should fund more programming, as they do through PBS and NPR. These outlets are reliable conservative irritants, but subsidized programming is far more honest and transparent, and ultimately less costly, than FCC regulation. Likewise, the universal service mechanisms for deployment of telephone and broadband demonstrate both congressional cowardice and a lack of FCC accountability.
Rather than make these subsidies overt through taxation and individual vouchers, Congress directs the FCC to collect fees from telephone companies in the Universal Service Fund and then ensure that consumers have access to communications networks. The increase is more startling when you realize the Senate Commerce Committee, which drafted the USF law, predicted in the mids "that competition and new technologies will greatly reduce the actual cost of providing universal service over time, thus reducing or eliminating the need for universal service support mechanisms" emphasis added.
This aspiration is now a fantasy, and an expensive one at that. GAO analysis of the program finds little evidence that USF appreciably increases phone or broadband penetration or competition, despite redistributing tens of billions of dollars from consumers to telecom companies since The true magnitude and direction of subsidies are difficult to determine because they are hidden in the complex machinations of the USF, but judging by the program's chief advocates, it's likely that most of the benefits accrue to telecom carriers, not consumers.
Congress does not fight hunger by paying construction companies to build grocery stores in needy areas, and it should not expand communications access via circuitous subsidies to carriers. This would give consumers and schools more choices to optimize their technology use according to their needs.
It would also reduce the wasteful overbuilding of telecom services and the misguided pursuit of ever more bandwidth. Finally, the essentially blank-check authority to approve the transactions of communications companies, who often have media affiliates, ought to be removed. These authorities have a long history of ensuring that transactions and mergers in various industries do not harm competition or consumers.
If the FCC's failures were more visible, it is unlikely the agency would survive in its current form. Every federal agency certainly has its problems, but in every major era of regulation, the FCC has managed to arrive at either the wrong policy or the right policy years too late.
In a world of content abundance and growing communications competition, the FCC is looking more and more like the creaky, New Deal relic that it is. The costs and dangers posed by the FCC have been accumulating for decades. The overlapping and bewildering maze of federal communications laws have created a mentality of compliance in our most innovative sectors.
The regulatory costs the FCC imposes show up not only in cable or cellphone bills but also in the dilution of First Amendment protections. The ability to license is the ability to punish, and the ability to target communications and media intermediaries is one the FCC will never relinquish.
The Fairness Doctrine was effectively eliminated in , and regulators will not bring it back, but the FCC's ability to shape media messages, reward friendly outlets, and discourage undesired speech has grown stronger since it began regulating the internet. Replacing many of the FCC's current responsibilities with a mixture of public-infrastructure investment to make broadband deployment easier, means-tested vouchers to minimize the digital divide, and increased, transparent funding for public affairs and local programming could attract pro-growth liberals as well as conservatives.
Both the media and the country would be strengthened as a result. Forgot password? Who Needs the FCC? Previous Article. Next Article. Insight from the Archives. A weekly newsletter with free essays from past issues of National Affairs and The Public Interest that shed light on the week's pressing issues.
All devices must be tested and meet emission rules, to comply with current regulations before receiving FCC Certification. Products that need certification are either intentional or unintentional radiators of radio frequency energy. Intentional radiators are devices like a smartphone, that must broadcast radio energy as part of their operation. Unintentional radiators are electronics, like a digital camera that can create radio signals and broadcast them through space or power lines as an unintentional byproduct of their operation.
The Federal Communications Commission put standards in place for testing devices based on the type of radio frequency that is emitted.
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