Well I think many of us here can appreciate Lawrence Lessig’s call to “blow up the FCC,” as he suggested in an interview with National Review this week. But I wonder, who, then, would be left to enforce his beloved net neutrality mandates and the media ownership rules he favors? He’s advocated regulation on both those fronts, but it ain’t gunna happen without some bureaucrats around to fill out the details and enforce all the red tape.
Regardless, I whole-hearted endorse his call for sweeping change. Here’s what he told National Review:
One of the biggest targets of reform that we should be thinking about is how to blow up the FCC. The FCC was set up to protect business and to protect the dominant industries of communication at the time, and its history has been a history of protectionism — protecting the dominant industry against new forms of competition—and it continues to have that effect today. It becomes a sort of short circuit for lobbyists; you only have to convince a small number of commissioners, as opposed to convincing all of Congress. So I think there are a lot of places we have to think about radically changing the scope and footprint of government.
Amen, brother. If he’s serious about this call, then I encourage Prof. Lessig to check out the “Digital Age Communications Act” project that over 50 respected, bipartisan economists and legal scholars penned together to start moving us down this path.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.