FCC Reauthorization Should Be A Deauthorization

The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Ryan Radia offered comment prior to the House Energy & Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology hearing today on the Federal Communications Commission Reauthorization:

“The FCC’s budget should be atop Congress’s chopping block as lawmakers look to streamline the government and eliminate unnecessary regulation. Ultimately, Congress should even consider an FCC deauthorization bill, rather than yet another round of reauthorization.

“The federal government should seriously consider why a Commission with a $430 million budget is permitted to continue to spend such a vast sum on a regulatory bureaucracy.

“The agency continues to use its power to regulate new, dynamic markets and in many ways regulates as if it were 1996 or, in some cases, 1934. From Internet regulation to media ownership, the FCC is increasingly an obsolete agency, yet it has embarked on new regulatory voyages in recent years, attempting to assert authority in markets that did not even exist in the 1990s.”