Free-Market, Minority Groups Pen President on FCC, FTC Nominees
Free-market and minority groups turned up the heat on President Barack Obama to nominate FCC and FTC commissioners who can best represent their perspectives on telecom and Internet regulatory matters. The pleas came in separate letters sent to the White House on Tuesday. Obama has not yet said who he plans to nominate as Democratic FCC chairman, Republican FCC commissioner and Democratic FTC commissioner. The White House did not comment on the letters.
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Obama should nominate commissioners who embrace “humility as both a guiding principle and a personal characteristic,” the free-market letter said. “Beware those who talk about ’steering’ technological change, ‘comprehensive’ approaches, or ‘pulling policy levers.’ These technocratic buzzwords reveal a fundamental misconception: that a better future can be engineered from the top down.” The letter was signed by TechFreedom, the International Center for Law and Economics, Heritage Action, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Americans for Tax Reform, FreedomWorks, Digital Liberty, Institute for Policy Innovation, Discovery Institute, Center for Individual Freedom, American Commitment, Less Government and others.
The first rule for policymakers should be “first do no harm,” the free-market groups said. “We need regulators who can resist the frequent urge to ‘do something’ about problems that are rapidly mooted by technological change anyway.” The groups said regulators should intervene “only to protect consumers from real harms, with economically sound rules that are flexible and predictable enough to accommodate (and occasionally even encourage) technological progress.”
Separately, 50 organizations representing minorities urged Obama to nominate FCC commissioners who would promote diversity and “assign the highest priority to racial and ethnic minority and women’s participation in the nation’s most influential industries.” The “FCC needs leaders committed to reversing the extraordinarily low representation of minorities and women in media and telecom ownership, procurement and employment,” the letter said. “In the next three years, FCC will be called upon to modernize our telephone systems, rationalize our spectrum policy, and achieve your administration’s goals of universal broadband access, adoption and informed use. As part of the unprecedented transformation of our economy from the industrial to the digital age, it is imperative that the FCC has leaders firmly committed to delivering first class digital citizenship to all Americans, including historically marginalized populations. We ask that you appoint such people.”
The letters are the most recent missives aimed at persuading Obama as he considers candidates for the open FCC slots. Earlier this month, an endorsement letter (CD April 12 p10) signed by nearly a dozen former White House, FCC and Capitol Hill advisers backed Tom Wheeler to become the next FCC chairman (http://bit.ly/17tN754). That letter responded to a previous letter from public interest groups concerned that Wheeler’s lobbying background could potentially disqualify him as a candidate (CD March 26 p1). Wheeler, managing partner at Core Capital Partners, was president of CTIA from 1992 to 2003, and of NCTA from 1979 to 1984. Another opponent of Wheeler’s nomination, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., told us Tuesday that he had not heard back from the White House about his letter signed by 37 senators endorsing Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel to be FCC chairman (CD April 10 p3).