The FCC’s new chairman, Brendan Carr, wants to chop regulations that he views as outdated and inefficient, and he’s asking the public and industry stakeholders for suggestions.
In a public notice headlined “Delete, Delete, Delete,” and issued Wednesday the Federal Communications Commission said the initiative’s impetus stems from a January executive order from US President Donald Trump calling on “administrative agencies to unleash prosperity through deregulation and ensure that they are efficiently delivering great results for the American people.”
The public notice “seeks comment on deregulatory initiatives that would facilitate and encourage American firms’ investment in modernizing their networks, developing infrastructure and offering innovative and advanced capabilities.”
The FCC said it’s looking to cut “existing rules that have outlived their usefulness,” and mandates that have “become outdated in light of subsequent developments …”
The agency didn’t get into specifics as to what rules it’s already considering removing. But it is generally believed that older rules regulating the TV broadcast industry, which in part limit ownership scale and coordination among station operators as they look to compete with newer, globally situated market forces, including Google and social media, in areas like local news might be high on the list to go.
The public notice reflects follow-through that broadcast industry leaders were expecting starting in November when Trump was re-elected, then almost immediately appointed Carr to lead the FCC.
“We're very excited about the upcoming regulatory environment,” Sinclair Broadcast Group CEO Chris Ripley told investors on November 6, the morning after the US presidential election. “It does feel like a cloud over the industry is lifting here. And we do think some much needed modernization of the regulations will be forthcoming.”
More recently, during Q4 earnings results, Sinclair’s Ripley reiterated that the broadcast station group owner would lobby for relaxing or eliminating of rules, including those imposing broadcast TV ownership caps and those prohibiting station group owners from directly negotiating with virtual MVPDs.
Meanwhile, Nexstar CEO Perry Sook told investors last month that recent conversations with newly appointed Republican lawmakers had convinced him that “the prospect is as good as it has been in my career to see meaningful ownership regulatory reform come to the broadcast industry.
“No one can with a straight face defend the current rules in the current environment,” Sook added. “And I think there's a real understanding that preserving local journalism at the local market level is in the country's national interest. And to do that, you've got to have strong companies and strong companies need to be able to get bigger and grow and innovate. And so, that message quite frankly is resonating on both sides of the aisle. I think you'll see continued movement, both at the FCC and the DOJ in terms of understanding that current regulations are outmoded.”
While the prospect of a less powerful FCC is being heralded by broadcasters, the agency’s supposed laissez faire posture under Carr seems in conflict with an early strategy of exhibiting FCC power to influence media and tech companies.
In just his first 50 days as FCC commissioner, Carr has sent letters to the top executives at Paramount Global, Comcast, NPR and YouTube, threatening the prospect of investigations, or other deployment of agency power.
Writing for the Brookings Institution, former FCC Commissioner Tom Wheeler said that Carr has “cagily created a new and coercive technique for operating outside the agency’s established statutes and procedures to attack corporate decisions he and Donald Trump do not like. That technique is to use its powers — or the threat thereof — to micromanage the activities of companies without needing to follow the niceties of commission votes and judicial review.”
And New Street Research analyst Blair Levin told FierceNetwork that despite the sweeping inquiry to deregulate, the notion appears somewhat counter to Carr’s other moves as chair so far – such as investigations of Comcast over DEI programs and alleged discrimination by YouTube TV related to carriage refusal.
“When looking at various letters he has written to companies since the election, he [Carr] appears to be broadening the scope of FCC regulation, rather than shrinking it,” Levin told FierceNetwork.