This week, the House unanimously
passed the FCC Consolidated Reporting Act (H.R. 2844) in a 415-0 vote, with 227 Republicans and 188
Democrats voting yea. The legislation requires one Communications
Marketplace Report instead of the eight separate reports previously required, and it also strikes redundancies and outdated
references in the Commission’s reporting requirements.
Representative Steve
Scalise kicked off the House debate on Monday by stating: “This bill is another step in the process of
streamlining government so that businesses can focus their time and resources
on growing our economy and creating jobs, instead of complying with outdated
and burdensome mandates from the federal government.”
Free State Foundation President Randolph May called
for the passage of the Consolidated Reporting Act in his testimony
at the July hearing before the House Subcommittee on Communications and
Technology entitled, Improving
FCC Process. May
stated:
“I
wholeheartedly support new Section 14, the proposed Federal Communications
Commission Consolidated Reporting Act of 2013. The required consolidated report
would replace the myriad of existing sector and technology-specific marketplace
reports that the Commission is now required to compile on a periodic basis.
Consolidation of the various competition/marketplace status reports should help
reduce the agency's workload somewhat because there necessarily is some
inherent duplication in producing the half dozen or more separate reports. But,
more importantly, the requirement to produce a consolidated report should steer
the Commission away from its pronounced tendency to view the separate
technology-based services as confined to their own "smokestacks" and
non-competitive with each other. In today's competitive digital services
environment characterized by convergence, adhering to the
"smokestack" view inherently neglects marketplace realities. For
example, the Commission still refuses to acknowledge the extent to which
wireless services compete with wireline services, even though nearly 40% of
U.S. households have abandoned landline telephone service.
The draft bill requires the
Commission to assess competition in the communications marketplace, taking into
account all the various services and technologies, and it specifically directs
the agency ‘to consider the effect of intermodal competition, facilities-based
competition, and competition from new and emergent communications services,
including the provision of content and communications using the Internet.’ This
requirement is especially important as part of the necessary effort to get the
FCC to take a more realistic, economically rigorous, view of the extent to
which competition now prevails in the communications marketplace.”
FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai
said in a statement Tuesday, “this is straightforward, good-government
legislation, and I hope that the U.S. Senate will act quickly to send this bill
to the President for his signature.”
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