Washington Monthly - The FCC Has Untapped Powers. The Next Administration Needs to Use Them

Open Markets Institute policy analyst Daniel Hanley writes in Washington Monthly about the increasing importance to revitalize dormant policies within the Federal Communications Commission, calling for a reinvigorated effort at restructuring consolidated telecommunications markets.

The nation’s concentration crisis is at a zenith in the modern era. State Attorneys General, Congress, the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice, and private parties are investigating and prosecuting corporate power. The next administration should take it a step further by revitalizing the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and use its dormant regulations to break up monopolies in the telecommunications industry.

Since the FCC was established in 1934, it’s been charged with structuring communications in the United States and ensuring that wireless and wired technologies are managed in the public interest. The FCC’s breadth of territory is astounding – radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable are all within the agency’s purview. As detailed in a report by the Center for Journalism and Liberty, the FCC once used its mandate to regulate abusive and exclusionary behavior by fostering a fair and competitive marketplace that serves the public interest. The commission’s enabling statute gave the agency strong substantive rulemaking authority to structure and regulate communications markets. Congress even gave the FCC the ability to allow mergers involving telecommunications companies that only “enhance[d] and promote[d], rather than eliminate or retard, competition” – a lower standard than the “substantially lessens competition” standard in the primary anti-merger statute, the Clayton Act.

As the report details, between 1934 to 1975, the FCC implemented some of the most progressive anti-monopoly policies in our nation’s history. The FCC required NBC, the then-dominant provider of radio communications, to divest significant parts of its operations to what is now ABC. The FCC prohibited broadcasters from owning more than one station in a geographic region and limited broadcasters to owning at most five stations nationally, a rule that partially continues today with the agency’s broadcast network rules.

Read the full article on Washington Monthly here.