Articles by James Gattuso 
James Gattuso is a Senior Research Fellow in Regulatory Policy in the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation. Gattuso also leads the Enterprise and Free Markets Initiative at Heritage, with responsiblity for a range of regulatory and market issues. Prior to joining Heritage, he served as Vice President for Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and also as Vice President for Policy Development with Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE). From 1990 to 1993, he was Deputy Chief of the Office of Plans and Policy at the Federal Communications Commission. From May 1991 to June 1992, he was detailed from the FCC to the office of Vice President Dan Quayle, where he served as Associate Director of the President's Council on Competitiveness. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife Dana, 8 year-old son, Peter (whom he relies upon to operate his VCR), and his four year-old daughter Lindsey (who does the DVD player.) He has no known hobbies, but is not nearly as boring as he seems.
How big were tech issues in the furious election campaigning that just finished in New Hampshire? Not very, reports CNET’s Anne Broache. “Voters here are famously not described as tech-savvy,” she writes. “To be precise, they are famously not described as especially concerned with topics like Net neutrality and intellectual property rights that you, our dear readers, are.”
No surprise, but Broache, with help from Declan McCullough, did some real footwork to back up that disinterest, conducting a few man-in-the-street interviews with Hampshireans.
” We weren’t disappointed”, she says. “Nor, we’re happy to report, did we get punched in the face for bothering those gritty, flinty, and hardy residents with questions about Net neutrality. What we did learn is that Granite State voters are not exactly preoccupied with political skirmishes over rewriting patent law, increasing H-1B visas, and, of course, the throughly pressing concern of broadband regulation”.
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It seems this week that “change” is on everyone’s lips, with every presidential candidate from Barack Obama to Duncan Hunter claiming to embody the word. But change isn’t limited to the campaign trail — with some fanfare, the National Association of Broadcasters announced this week that it was jumping in the game with some changes of its own. 
Change certainly would be welcome a the NAB, which took some rather oddball positions last year, arguing for subsidies to ensure that “no TV set…gets disenfranchised” (“One TV Set, One Vote: Broadcasters Assert Rights for Televisions“), and asserting simutaneously that broadcasters do and do not compete with satellite radio (“National Association of Broadcasters v. National Association of Broadcasters“).
So now will NAB retract these silly positions, starting out the new year fresh, with better-grounded arguments on behalf of its members? Sadly, no. The change implemented at the NAB is a new logo. And a new tagline: “Advocacy. Education. Innovation.” NAB President David Rehr says this will embody the interest group’s “reinvigorated sense of advocacy.”
Right. Now if only it can work on reinvigorating a sense of good policies to advocate.
The Wall Street Journal today nailed FCC Chairman Kevin Martin today for yesterday’s two-step on ownership, easing ownership rules on newspapers, but imposing new ones on cable. The WSJ’s conclusion:
“Mr. Martin’s animus toward the cable business is by now a matter of public record, and yesterday’s action can only be understood as part of his personal campaign to make the industry’s life as hard as possible. The D.C. Circuit is almost certain to strike down this rule, as it did the last time. But by then there may be a fresh face as FCC Chairman, and the only winners will be the lawyers who billed the hours”.
Worth reading.
The casual observer can be excused for being a bit confused by the on-going cable imbroglio at the FCC. Throw away your old-fashioned ideological assumptions about who should line up where — the players on this one have been as jumbled as a flight schedule on a holiday weekend. A Republican chairman of the FCC, with support from leftish activist groups and AT&T, is pushing for massive regulation. He is being challenged by fellow Republicans on the commission, as well as Republicans in Congress. Now comes one more voice against new cable regulation: Jesse Jackson’s.
That’s right. Jesse Jackson, the founder of the Rainbow Coalition, thinks FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is going too far:
“There is virtually no political support from either progressives or conservatives for such pet policies as a la carte pricing, which would raise prices for consumers and hurt most programmers, or for the various ‘leased-access’ programs that will squeeze out channel space for minority-owned programmers,” Jackson said in comments earlier this week.
“Rather than work through the democratic process in Congress, a bureaucratic agency should not be using a 20-year-old-legal clause to implement wholesale policy changes that hurt consumers and hurt minority television programmers.”
And he’s right. Despite the rhetoric, regulation isn’t the friend of diversity — it more often suppresses it than fosters it.
Welcome to the deregulatory coalition, Rev. Jackson. You can sit over there, where Mr. Martin used to sit.
Well, it won’t happen, but it would be a Good Thing nonetheless. Case in point: Commissioner McDowell took on the current chairman’s plans for regulation of the cable industry in remarks before the Media Institute yesterday, saying:
“I have a lot of questions that need answering. 
Why is the FCC suddenly changing its evidentiary standard and methodology just for this one industry? How will this abrupt and radical departure affect other analyses and proceedings? Doesn’t this shift weaken arguments for updating the cross ownership ban? Does our proposed change affect our analysis of the proposed XM-Sirius merger? How do we reconcile decades of data showing more convergence and more competition among more delivery platforms with this sudden reversal? I am searching for credible answers to these and many other questions—thus far to no avail.”
He also defended the FCC’s moves to reform media ownership, ridiculing the idea that after 11 years of deliberation, it is rushing to judgment on this issue.
Good stuff.
Here’s the whole speech.
Chairman Kevin Martin’s attempt to assert broad – and virtually unlimited — powers over cable television has sparked a real imbroglio over at the FCC. The key question: has the cable industry reached the magic 70 percent penetration rate required to trigger new regulatory powers? Martin says yes, apparently using numbers from Warren Communications (the owner of Communications Daily). Warren Communications itself, however, has said its data shows no such thing. Fellow GOP commissioners Robert McDowell and Deborah Tate – apparently feeling a bit betrayed by Martin — on Thursday took the unusual step of writing directly to Warren Publishing for “any and all information” regarding the data.
Warren hasn’t responded yet, but that hasn’t stopped a handful of regulation supporters from weighing in in defense of the FCC’s attempted power grab. Among them: Free Press, the Media Access Project, Consumers Union, the Consumer Federation of America, AT&T…
Whoa! What’s AT&T doing in this motley group?
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It’s a familiar storyline: frustrated by political opposition to his agenda, the government head declares a state of emergency, invoking an obscure, never before used, provision of the law to assert virtually unlimited authority. Television is the first target. And lawyers are mobilizing.
A summary of Pervez Musharraf’s power grab in Pakistan? Not quite: the story is being played out right here in Washington, D.C., with reports that the FCC – led by Chairman Kevin Martin – will soon assert emergency rule over cable television. 
The tool is section 612(g) of the Communications Act. This rather obscure statutory provision states that if cable systems reach 70 percent of U.S. households, and 70 percent of those households actually subscribe to cable, then “the Commission may promulgate any additional rules necessary to provide diversity of information sources.” Never mind other provisions of law – 612(g) — read literally — says that if it flickers and arrives by cable, the FCC can regulate it. (It is far from clear, however, whether Congress intended the provision to have such a sweeping impact).
The Commission reportedly plans to assert powers under this “70-70” rule at a meeting later this month. The declaration would buttress a phalanx of new regulations on cable TV service being pushed by Chairman Martin, including mandated carriage of multi-cast broadcast channels, mandated unbundling of cable channels, caps on the cable ownership, new rules on the purchase of content from programmers, expanded mandates on leased access to channels, and new regulations on cable set-top box devices.
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Is the FCC moving too fast on media ownership? Senators Byron Dorgan and Trent Lott think so, announcing new legislation this week to slow things down a bit. His bill, S. 2332, would require the FCC to wait 90 days before promulgating any changes to current ownership rules, and to conduct a separate proceeding on localism. The bill is spurred by reports that Chairman Kevin Martin is pushing for a final vote on changes to the FCC’s ban on cross-ownership of newspapers and broadcast outlets by the end of the year.
House Commerce Committee chair John Dingell has echoed the senators’ call, warning the FCC “against a rush to judgment in its media ownership proceeding,” as has activist groups such as Free Press – the energizer bunny of government regulation – which is warning that:
“Kevin Martin, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has been keeping a secret from the American people. He wants to push through plans to remove decades-old media ownership protections. And he’s trying to do it without public scrutiny”.
Now, I’m the first to recognize that the FCC has a lot of faults, but moving to fast is a new one to me. The Commission deliberations have long been known for their Bleak House qualities, extending – like the case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce – seemingly for generations. Decisionmaking at the agency is – as long-time FCC policy chief Robert Pepper put it – “infinitely elastic.”
But it this case different? Is the FCC – like a runaway glacier – suddenly moving dangerously fast on media ownership? Hardly.
Take a look at the record.
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For those you who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) listen to our recent podcast on the Comcast kerfuffle, the Heritage Foundation has now released an edited transcript of the discussion. You can find it here.
With the shrill factor getting louder each day in this controversy, Richard Bennett and Ed Felton — as well as our TLF regulars — provide what I think is a good, fairly nuanced, discussion of the controversy.
Worth a read.
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.