It's Time For The FCC To Start Over From Scratch

"FCC reform" has become a buzzword in broadband policy circles recently, with new Chairman Genachowski committed to bringing the agency into the 21st century and everyone acknowledging that something needs to be done to improve its efficiency and effectiveness.

But so far, most of what I've been hearing about how to reform the FCC deals with how to improve specific programs, like USF reform, or specific functionality, like improving their website.

Yet I can't help but wonder: are incremental improvements sufficient to get the FCC where it needs to be?

I ask this because we have to be realistic about the current state of affairs. For starters, the FCC has grown into this massively complex beast over the years because every time a new communications technology came into existence a new set of rules had to be put in place to regulate it. And over time these rules became more detailed and convoluted as the FCC tried to keep pace with technological evolution.

The FCC has spent decades building up these stove-piped regulations that apply certain rules to certain technologies.

And yet the core challenge the FCC faces in this day and age is the fact that these communications technologies are now merging. The distinctions between phone and TV providers has already disappeared, and increasingly the technologies themselves are combining into new forms that don't really exist in any one silo.

The FCC is operating in a world now that's completely different from that of the 20th century. But so far it has not adapted to this new paradigm other than to open up a catchall category of "information services" that has fewer regulations and therefore is the category every service provider wants to fall under. The problem with this is that means the regulations that were in other silos to protect the public's interests are now becoming marginalized.

What this all leads me to is wondering if it's possible for the FCC to become relevant to the 21st century communications paradigm through incremental changes to its existing stovepipes. And on that front, my gut tells me no.

I liken this to a story I heard from a developer friend of mine who was hired onto a project that he spent years trying to incrementally improve. Eventually he realized that he was spending more time fixing problems than on making progress to improve the functionality. So he decided to stop wasting time fixing a leaky ship and instead focus on building a new ship from scratch. Now of course it's not easy to do this. It takes a lot of time, money, and energy. But as a result he now has an application that runs way better than the old one and that stands ready to be expanded in exciting new ways.

I think we have to strongly consider taking the same approach to FCC reform. We don't just need the agency to be a little bit better; we need to have them fundamentally reimagine their role in 21st century communications policymaking.

Yet this doesn't have to be an insurmountable feat. The key is to start by establishing a core premise and building out from there. And the most obvious building block of our 21st century communications infrastructure is that of bandwidth.

Bandwidth is the common element that unites 21st century communications services. It doesn't matter what service is being delivered via IP, it's all using bandwidth.

Also, enabling the availability of more bandwidth is fundamentally what we're talking about when discussing creating a national broadband plan.

Basically, bandwidth is the thing that cuts across all the silos of 20th century technologies within the 21st century paradigm, so I believe that it should be the focus for the FCC moving forward.

With this in mind, I see the national broadband plan as the perfect opportunity for the FCC to stick a stake in the ground and claim ownership over this issue. Over making sure that plenty of high quality, reliable, and affordable bandwidth is available to all Americans. To get everyone online consuming bandwidth. And to encourage the incorporation of using bandwidth to improve all facets of society.

Taking this approach can also help move us towards a unified communications policy framework. For example, instead of taking different money from different services to fund different programs, with a bandwidth-centric mindset we can pursue a bitstream approach to raising funds for things like USF and public media.

What if instead of charging for USF just on phone service and public access channels just on TV service, we combined all communications services under a single bandwidth umbrella and charged a unified fee across all of them in order to fund all of our public interest obligations?

This would stop the practice of providers trying to game the system to avoid having to pay into either of these programs by getting reclassified as an information service. It would also simplify changes moving forward.

I'm not saying that we should abandon all rules associated with specific services like voice or video, but instead that in order to craft the best possible policies for the 21st century communications paradigm that we need our regulatory mindset to match the evolution of technology. We need to acknowledge that just as the industry is making radical changes, the FCC needs to do the same, that in the face of a communications industry already well on its way to fundamentally shifting its paradigm that incremental change to existing FCC policies won't be sufficient.

So I implore the FCC and those trying to influence them: let's not settle for incremental improvements to an outdated paradigm. We're long overdue to approach this reform from a more foundational level. Because that's the only way I see the FCC being an enabling force in the 21st century. And I can think of no better way to reset the FCC than to focus them on the core challenge of bandwidth as the unifying force for communications policy.