Reforming the FCC

The current policymaking tools and apparatus used at the FCC are broken. Rebuilding the agency’s culture will require not only the right leaders for a new era, but a systematic re-examination of the agency’s institutional processes with an eye towards building a new culture. In this respect, the reshaping of how the agency operates will be equally challenging and important to the substantive issues that the agency will address in the years ahead.

The enormity of the challenge in reforming the FCC leads some, like Lawrence Lessig, to call for the abolition of the agency. As Lessig sees it, “[y]ou can’t fix DNA.”^[172] In taking this view, Lessig both understates the concomitant challenge of building a new institutional culture that reflects the values discussed herein as well as overstates the impossibility of reform from within. Indeed, like the FTC’s impressive re-examination and re-building of its institutional culture over the last 25 years, the FCC has an important opportunity to both pay close attention to and address its institutional failings. Given the FCC’s critical role in our information economy, it is critical that the FCC change the way it conducts its business-whether through internal reform or abolition-and policymakers and scholars must take seriously the importance of engaging in this debate as to the FCC as well as to other regulatory agencies that suffer similar defects.