Has anyone actually found anything on the FCC’s website? If so, they should consider themselves lucky. Fcc.gov has long been a source of frustration for me as I constantly find myself going in cybercircles looking for the simplest of documents or information. Apparently, I’m not alone in my frustration — Mike Marcus — a former FCC staffer — recently ranted about the site in his blog. Calling the it the “nation’s communications policy attic” he dissects the problems with the website, ranging from the lack of a usable search engine to the endless clutter. Anyone who has tried to extract information from the site — god forbid without already knowing by heart the magic docket number of the specific proceeding they are interested in — will find themselves nodding in agreement.
How ironic that the nation’s communications policy agency — whom many want to take responsibility for regulating the Internet — cannot itself communicate on the web.
Kudos to Marcus for bringing this up. When he was with the FCC, Marcus (with whom I had the opportunity to work) was among the rarest of breeds — a professional bureaucrat who fought against bureaucracy. He apparently hasn’t changed now that he’s in the private sector.
(Hat tip to Jerry Brito for pointing me to Marcus’ piece.)
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.