Wiley Looks at Future of Broadcast Regulation

Former FCC Chairman Richard Wiley said current rulemaking procedures have to speed up to address the many regulatory challenges facing the commission. The new FCC chairman “has to make decisions; the commission has to set deadlines,” said Wiley at an American University law school symposium on broadcast regulation. “The commission has to move to a more effective manner of getting things done,” said Wiley.

Tuesday’s symposium marked the 30th anniversary of A Marketplace Approach to Broadcast Regulation, a 1982 Texas Law Review article by then-FCC Chairman Mark Fowler and then-commission staffer Dan Brenner, now a Los Angeles Superior Court judge. The article laid out Fowler’s arguments for applying the same standards of regulation that were applied to newspapers to broadcast TV, which at the time faced much stricter oversight. The “print model” led to a substantial deregulation of the broadcast industry, said Fowler and several other speakers.

Wiley and others focused on the upcoming spectrum incentive auction as a point of tension for current FCC procedures. Wiley named the auction as the No. 1 issue on a “top 10 list” of issues facing outgoing Chairman Julius Genachowski’s replacement, saying he’s particularly concerned about the issue of repacking for non-participating stations. Rutgers University Information Policy Professor Ellen Goodman said the idea that the spectrum auction would reset the broadcast industry to a “state of nature” was false, since the market will likely favor the larger stations. Public Knowledge’s John Bergmayer said not enough provisions were being made for future entrants into the industry. “Companies that don’t already have seats at the table don’t have a voice."

The FCC also came under fire for the state of its indecency policies. University of Miami Professor Lili Levi said the FCC should stop regulating content and allow market pressures to guarantee decency. However, Wiley said that, despite widespread criticism of the current FCC indecency policy, he believed the current environment made it difficult to change. “It’s going to be around for a long time,” he said.

Wiley’s list of issues facing the new chairman also included media ownership concerns, which he said the commission should address by loosening some rules, including allowing ownership of two stations in the same market and increased foreign investment. “Capital is the real problem in minority ownership,” said Wiley. He also weighed in on the shift to Internet Protocol networks, saying the commission must limit the amount of time that carriers will have to support both the old network and the original public switched telephone network.