James Byrnes, Meet Brendan Carr!

 You may not know the name James Byrnes! But, for me, he comes to mind. Mr. Byrnes once declared: The nearest approach to immortality on Earth is a government bureau." 

James Byrnes served as a governor of South Carolina, United States Senator, a Supreme Court Justice, and U.S. Secretary of State, aside from other government positions. Yes, you read that right!

 

So, by virtue of his experience, Mr. Byrnes knew a thing or two about the difficulty of shrinking the size of government.

 

Admittedly FCC Chairman Brendan Carr hasn't served in as many high-level government positions as James Byrnes. No one else has. But Carr has served in key FCC positions long enough – as General Counsel, Commissioner, and now Chairman – to understand that there are plenty of legacy regulations remaining in the FCC's rule book that are no longer necessary. Not only are they no longer necessary, but many of them, considering the dramatically changed telecommunications and media environment since they were adopted, impose costs and burdens that affirmatively harm consumers and competition.

 

I have criticized a few actions taken by Chairman Carr, for example, the use of the agency's transaction review process to impose extraneous conditions not unique to the transaction in approving the Skydance – Paramount CBS transaction, and the imposition of what appears to be an unwarranted forfeiture on Telnyx without fair notice of what standard it was expected to meet.

                                                                 

                                                                          

But, on the whole, I applaud the way that Chairman Carr is forging ahead in the DELETE, DELETE, DELETEproceeding and others to remove bunches of regulations that should no longer exist and, frankly, should have been eliminated years ago. For example, yesterday the Commission proposed to eliminate nearly 100 outdated, no longer necessary, broadcast rules using the Direct Final Rule process. The public will have 10 days after Federal Register publication to offer comments regarding any of the proposed rules. Absent the submission of a "significant adversecomment," the proposed elimination of the rule will occur. If the Commission determines that a "significant adverse comment" has been submitted, then that particular rule will go through the normal notice and comment process.

 

In a 1995 Recommendation, The Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), of which I have served as a Public Member and now Senior Fellow, suggested that agencies use the Direct Final Rule process to more quickly eliminate unnecessary regulations "in all cases where the ‘unnecessary’ prong of the good cause exemption is available…." On many occasions since then, to little or no avail, I have urged the FCC to consider employing the process.

 

So, I heartily commend Brendan Carr for taking the initiative to do so now. There will still be an opportunity for public comment when the Direct Final Rule process is employed, and, if experience proves there is a need, there can be adjustments to ensure that non-frivolous substantive objections are properly considered.

 

Shortly before becoming FCC Chairman, Ajit Pai, speaking at a Free State Foundation event, declared: “We need to fire up the weed whacker and remove those rules that are holding back investment, innovation and job creation.”Considering all the obstacles, including the time and energy expended to reverse the then-existing mandate regulating Internet service providers as public utilities, Chairman Pai made a good start. But now Chairman Carr has truly fired up the metaphorical "weed whacker" in a way that looks to make meaningful progress in the cause of eliminating costly, burdensome, unnecessary regulations.

 

He may not have eliminated a government bureau. But I suspect that James Byrnes would give Brendan Carr credit for what he's doing on the deregulation front.

Roth's NTIA Takes Early Aim at Rate Regulation

On July 30, 2025, Arielle Roth officially assumed the role of Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information, a position that includes serving as Administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). Days later, NTIA released updated Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) regarding the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program. Notably, the revised FAQs underscore a significant policy shift from the Biden Administration's approach, one that aligns with Congress's explicit prohibition against broadband rate regulation.

This latest version of the FAQs builds on the BEAD Restructuring Policy Notice (BEAD RPN) that was released in early June. The BEAD RPN made numerous substantive changes to the Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) that the Biden Administration NTIA issued in May 2022, including several addressing the low-cost service option (LCSO) requirement for BEAD Program grant recipients.

Under the NOFO, NTIA imposed prescriptive price and service terms for the LCSO. These included effective mandates on the maximum monthly rate, restrictions that, in substance, amounted to prohibited rate regulation.

The RPN eliminated those requirements: "BEAD subgrantees must still comply with the statutory provision to offer at least one LCSO, but NTIA hereby prohibits [states] from explicitly or implicitly setting the LCSO rate a subgrantee must offer." The updated FAQ expounds upon this point:

The IIJA prohibits NTIA or the Assistant Secretary from engaging in rate regulation. Because the Assistant Secretary must approve the LCSO in the Final Proposal, the rate contained may not be the result of rate regulation. The RPN addressed this fundamental flaw in the BEAD NOFO. The RPN eliminated BEAD NOFO requirements dictating price and other terms for the required low-cost service option.

In addition, the FAQ notes that, "[p]er the RPN, states may not apply state laws to reimpose LCSO requirements removed by the RPN."

This, of course, is a sharp departure from the Biden Administration's deeply flawed approach. As I described in a February 2024 Perspectives from FSF Scholars, "Virginia Flags NTIA's Impermissible Pressure to Regulate Broadband Rates," NTIA sought to compel Virginia to "specify an exact price or formula" for the LCSO.

That demand directly conflicted with Section 60102(h)(5)(D) of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which states that "[n]othing in this title may be construed to authorize the Assistant Secretary or the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to regulate the rates charged for broadband service."

By making explicit that neither NTIA nor a state may dictate broadband rates, the RPN and the updated FAQs realign BEAD Program implementation with the letter of the law. In doing so, they empower grant recipients to develop sustainable offerings. They also foster competition, innovation, and continued private investment (to the tune of $2.2 trillion and counting).

Released in the first few days of Roth's tenure as NTIA Administrator, these updated FAQs are a welcome indicator that, going forward, the BEAD Program will hew far more closely to congressional intent.

The "Block BEARD Act" Deserves Speedy Consideration

It's pretty rare these days to have legislation drafted in Congress on bipartisan basis that attempts to address a serious national problem in a meaningful way. Sure, bipartisanship may still occur in  naming post offices or designating a new national Peanut Butter Day or Green Pea Day, but not much else.

 

But Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC), Chris Coons (D-DE), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and Adam Schiff (D-CA) released a discussion draft of the Block Bad Electronic Art and Recording Distributors (Block BEARD) Act of 2025. The legislation, if adopted, would allow copyright owners who have had their property stolen to seek an order in federal court to block dedicated foreign online piracy operations from making that stolen content available to American households.

 

Foreign websites pirating American movies, TV shows, art, and books steal tens of billions of dollars from the U.S. economy each year. This theft of Americans' intellectual property enabled by foreign websites costs the U.S. creative community hundreds of thousands of jobs. Consumers are harmed through the malware, phishing, identity theft, and financial fraud perpetuated online by the international pirates.

 

Here is a short summary of what the Discussion Draft intends to accomplish copied from Senator Tillis's press release:

 

The Block BEARD Act would empower copyright owners to seek U.S. federal court orders against foreign websites dedicated to digital piracy, preventing them from making stolen content accessible to American households. To obtain relief, copyright holders must present evidence of specific harm and demonstrate the criminal nature of the targeted site. Courts could then direct internet service providers block access to the identified sites, while granting those providers immunity from liability, including for claims related to the petitioner’s actions.  The legislation includes strong public interest safeguards to protect free expression, due process, and legitimate online services operating in compliance with U.S. law. This targeted legal tool mirrors successful approaches used in over 50 democratic countries to curb foreign piracy operations that undermine creative industry jobs and expose users to malware, identity theft, and fraud.

 

While it's always possible the draft bill might be improved as it goes through the legislative process, the draft appears to strike a proper balance in addressing what is a very serious problem of foreign theft of the intellectual property of the U.S. creative community while safeguarding the legitimate interests of others, including online providers.

 

Senator Tillis and his Senate colleagues should be commended, and the Block BEARD Act deserves speedy consideration.

 

What Goes Around Comes Around

A quarter century ago I published a column in Legal Times titled, "Any Volunteers?" The editors added this subtitle: "The FCC unfairly regulates 'by condition' when it extracts concessions from merging telecom companies."

 

In the column, I criticized what was then becoming an increasingly frequent practice of extracting so-called "voluntary" concessions from applicants seeking to obtain FCC approval for their pending transactions involving mergers, acquisitions, or the like. Because the FCC reviews proposed transactions – whether the applicants hold spectrum licenses or common carrier authorizations – under the amorphous "public interest" standard, FCC commissioners found it easy to justify the extraction of conditions that, at least in their minds, comported with the public interest.

 

As I detailed in the column in 2000, often the voluntary, usually "midnight" concessions did not involve matters unique to the applicants before the Commission. And the conditions imposed did not involve compliance with specific then-existing requirements of the Communications Act or of Commission rules. The justification for imposing them was that they somehow advanced the public interest. The Legal Times column contains many examples of extraneous conditions imposed to obtain transaction approvals during the Clinton FCC period.

 

Regarding what I called "regulation by condition," I said: "The bottom line is that this process unfairly singles out merger applicants for regulation that, if justified at all, should be applied on an industrywide basis." And I urged Congress to reform the FCC's transaction review process.

 

In the ensuing 25 years, on many occasions I have bemoaned the ongoing practice – used most often, but not exclusively, by Democrat-controlled commissions – to extract extraneous "voluntary" commitments from supplicants seeking approval of proposed transactions. Again, by extraneous I mean the imposition of conditions that are not transaction-specific or uniquely related to the applicants as opposed to a generic group of market participants.

 

In both 2011 and 2013, my testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee urged reform of the FCC's transaction review process to prohibit the agency from imposing any condition not narrowly tailored to remedy a unique transaction-specific harm.

 

As a matter of principle, my position regarding the FCC's handling of transaction reviews and the need for reform of the process has been consistent throughout.

 

Which brings me to the FCC's approval of Skydance's acquisition of Paramount CBS, including its broadcast television stations. In approving the transaction, the FCC's Republican majority imposed an anti-DEI condition and an ""unbiased journalism" condition based on commitments offered by Skydance. Here's the FCC's description of both conditions:

 

"Commitment to Unbiased Journalism. Skydance has made written commitments to ensuring that the new company’s array of news and entertainment programming will embody a diversity of viewpoints across the political and ideological spectrum and that CBS’s reporting will be fair,

unbiased, and fact-based. To promote transparency and increased accountability, Skydance commits, for a period of at least two years, to have in place an ombudsman who will report to the President of New Paramount and evaluate complaints of bias.

 

Ensures that Discriminatory DEI Policies End. Skydance, which has no DEI programs in place today, has committed that it will not establish any such initiatives at the new company and confirms that New Paramount will also be committed to equal opportunity employment and nondiscrimination. This will ensure that the combined business will enact policies and practices consistent with the law and the public interest."

 

At this point in our nation's history, I generally oppose government-imposed or government-cajoled DEI programs because, all too often, in practical effect and however couched, they turn into coercive mandates that lead to forms of invidious discrimination. In other words, in effect, they deny equal treatment to those individuals who happen to be outside of the groups favored by the DEI programs and who did not engage in perpetuating any form of discrimination themselves. And, like many, I am disturbed by the demonstrable left-leaning political bias that still largely prevails in many of what we called "mainstream" media outlets. So, philosophically, I am disposed to be sympathetic to the concerns that give rise to the FCC's anti-DEI and "unbiased journalism" conditions.

 

Nevertheless, as a matter of principle, I dislike seeing the FCC's transaction review process continue to be used to impose "voluntary" concessions not uniquely related to the specific transaction – as it was in this instance. To be sure, the "public interest" standard may be sufficiently indeterminate for today's Republican Commission majority to justify imposition of the anti-DEI and anti-political bias conditions. Certainly, under the public interest rubric, Democrat commissioners, historically, have resorted to the extraction of "voluntary" concessions leading to imposition of concededly extraneous conditions much more frequently than have their Republican colleagues. If you're not familiar with these instances, you can start with my "Any Volunteers?" column and go from there.

 

So, I could say "what goes around, comes around." Or what's "good for the goose is good for the gander." Or some such. There's lots of truth in those old sayings, and there's part of me that wants to leave it at that. This is especially so because there's rarely, if ever, any acknowledgement by those now decrying the FCC's handling of the Skydance transaction that "their side" has abused the review process in the past.

 

But I prefer not to leave it at that. I prefer to take leave offering the same consistent message I have offered for a quarter-century: Congress should reform the FCC's transaction review process along the lines I've advocated. That reform starts by prohibiting the agency from imposing any condition not narrowly tailored to remedy a unique transaction-specific harm.

Anna Gomez Is Wrong About Defunding Public Broadcasting

By Randolph May 

Unsurprisingly, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez was quick to condemn Congress's decision to defund "public" [read: government-funded] media. After the Senate acted, she issued a statement claiming the action "is a key step in a coordinated campaign to silence public media, and the latest attempt by this Administration to censor and control speech."

She calls the defunding a "one-sided attack on free speech." 

Commissioner Gomez's condemnation perhaps would be more worthy of consideration if she had given even a mere nod in the direction of acknowledging the pronounced left-leaning bias in public broadcasting's programming, especially that of NPR. You won't find any such acknowledgement in her statement, or I suspect in any of her other declamations.

It would take much more than a short blog post to catalogue all the instances evidencing NPR's leftist bias. But for a short primer, please see long-time (25+ years) NPR senior editor Uri Berliner's piece in the Free Press highlighting some key examples, such as NPR's steadfast refusal to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story and insistence that the Wuhan lab leak theory regarding COVID was nonsense. And, as Mr. Berliner says, NPR's reporting on the contentious issues of climate change, the war in Gaza, and gender identity treatments for adolescents "leaned on moralizing and emotional certitude more than rigorous factual analysis."

So, while Ms. Gomez talks about "silencing those who report the news accurately," absent some acknowledgement – even a teensy, weensy one – that there have been legitimate issues of bias in public broadcasting's programming that needed to be addressed, her entreaties ring hollow. And this is especially so because we're talking about taxpayer-funded broadcasters, not private media outlets.

Ms. Gomez characterizes the defunding of public broadcasting as a "one-sided attack on free speech" by the Trump administration. Putting aside whether her accusation regarding one-sidedness squares with reality, she should acknowledge this truth: There are important differences between "public" media and private media when it comes to how the government should respond to claims of political bias.

It is not an attack on free speech for Congress and the president to decide that taxpayers should not be required to fund speech claimed to be politically biased. On the other hand, there may be – as Commissioner Gomez has suggested many times – threats to free speech protected by the First Amendment if the government, whether the Trump administration or any other, threatens private media outlets with adverse consequences based on the content of their programming.

That is the ground on which Commissioner Gomez should stand.  

 

A Revisionist History of the BEAD Program Ignores Congressional Intent

Today's Policyband (subscription required) included a useful pointed critique of a July 9 Washington Monthly article suggesting a clandestine plot by Republican lawmakers to sabotage from within the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program. But there is even more that can be said by way of rebuttal.

The extraneous, partisan policies layered on top of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) by the Biden NTIA were not the issue, authors Paul Glastris and Kainoa Lowman insist. Instead, they make the unsupported claim that "the complexity and delays of the BEAD program and the broader failure of Washington over many years to solve the digital divide is overwhelmingly the result of telecom monopolies whose economic and political power previous administrations unleashed."

Likening NTIA's Notice of Funding Opportunity to an "everything bagel," the piece nevertheless goes to great lengths to assure us that requirements not found in the IIJA – promoting policies relating to labor standards, climate threats, net neutrality, third-party (so-called "open") access, and so on – "were not major time sinks." The real impediment, they suggest, was "incumbents' goal of avoiding competition to their existing infrastructure." The truth, meanwhile, is that lawmakers appropriately took reasonable steps to prevent the use of federal subsidies to overbuild privately financed networks to prevent waste and encourage additional private investment.

In the IIJA, Congress, exercising its authority under Article I of the Constitution's Spending Clause, reached a relatively rare bipartisan compromise. That compromise sought to learn from the mistakes of the past – mistakes that the authors describe at length – and once and for all connect those remaining locations not yet served by privately constructed broadband Internet infrastructure.

According to USTA | The Broadband Association, providers have invested nearly $2.2 trillion in broadband infrastructure since 1996 – including $94.7 billion just in 2023. Largely because of that capital spending, the FCC reported in May that "110 million homes and small businesses (95 percent) have access to a terrestrial fixed service with speeds of 100 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload (100/20) or greater."

What the authors willfully choose to ignore is that the stated goal of the IIJA was to subsidize the prohibitively high price tag to connect primarily rural locations still "unserved" – not to use taxpayer dollars to compete with these existing, privately funded networks, which of course would disincentivize future investment.

Accordingly, Congress in the IIJA defined "unserved" as without access to speeds of at least 25/3 Mbps and "underserved" as lacking access to speeds of at least 100/20 Mbps; designated the FCC's then-under-development National Broadband Map as the definitive source of location-specific service availability information; established a challenge process to verify that information; and enlisted state-level offices to determine how best to overcome the unique geographic, financial, and other factors encountered within their borders.

To be sure, in practice BEAD Program implementation has left much to be desired. To suggest, however, that measures agreed to by Congress to avoid the wasteful overbuilding of existing broadband infrastructure using taxpayer dollars somehow tell a "story … of how telecom monopolies are behind the failure of government to solve the digital divide" ignores both the substantial role played by Biden NTIA overreach and the well-documented – in the article itself, no less – mistakes of the past.

Instead of engaging with the IIJA's actual text and structure, the authors rely on a convenient – but wrong-headed – narrative to try to deflect accountability away from those truly responsible and onto those that have invested the trillions necessary to connect nearly every location in the U.S.

Governor Moore Should Emulate Virginia's Regulatory Reform Efforts

 Maryland Governor Wes Moore talks a good game (well, sometimes!) about making Maryland's government more efficient, effective, and accountable. But talking and doing are two different things. 

During the last decade, my Free State Foundation colleagues have often offered ideas, across Democrat and Republican administrations, for implementing meaningful regulatory reform measures in Maryland. While reducing wasteful spending in Maryland's budget is important, of course, cutting red tape and eliminating unnecessary regulations also serves leads to cost savings that enhances consumer welfare.

 

At an event yesterday, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin announced that the state had surpassed his target of cutting regulatory requirements by 25%. To lead his regulatory reform efforts, Governor Youngkin quickly established a new Office of Regulatory Management (ORM), initially led by Andrew Wheeler and for the last couple of years directed by Reeve Bull, a well-known expert regarding regulation and administrative law.

 

In this piece, "Regulatory Reform in the Old Dominion," Susan Dudley, herself one of the nation's foremost scholars on regulation, chronicles what was achieved in Virginia by Governor Youngkin, Reeve Bull, and the regulatory reform team – and how they did it.

 

If you are interested in improving Maryland's economic climate and benefitting consumer welfare by eliminating red tape, it's worth reading Susan Dudley's piece and getting inspired by Governor Youngkin's effort. More to the point, I commend it to Governor Moore – hoping it might not be too late for him to gaze across the Potomac and get inspired too.

PRESS RELEASE: FSF's Randolph May Commends FCC for Employing Direct Final Rulemaking

 

 

Regarding the FCC’s July 3 announcement that it plans to employ the “Direct Final Rule” process to eliminate unnecessary rules, Free State Foundation President Randolph May issued the following statement:

“At different times over many years, I’ve encouraged the FCC to issue Direct Final Rules to expedite getting unnecessary and costly rules off its books. With direct final rulemaking, there is still an opportunity for the public to comment, but if no significant adverse comments are submitted within an abbreviated time frame, then the rules identified in the agency’s notice are eliminated without the need for any further bureaucratic rigmarole. The Direct Final Rule process, recognized and promoted by the Administrative Conference of the United States, is a perfect vehicle for advancing the aims of the DELETE DELETE DELETE proceeding, and I commend Chairman Carr for using it to achieve worthwhile deregulatory goals.”

PRESS RELEASE: The USF Fund May Be Constitutional, But It's on Shaky Ground

 

Free State Foundation President Randolph May issued the following statement regarding the Supreme Court’s decision in the FCC v. Consumers’ Research case:

“While the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the FCC’s universal service programs, I hope the challenge at least served to highlight the long-standing problems with the nearly $10 billion per year Universal Service Fund. Without meaningful substantial reform, the USF fund, as it exists now, is unsustainable. Consumers of traditional telephone services are now paying a tax of 36% on all their calls as the contribution base continues to shrink. Congress needs to get serious about engaging in a top-to-bottom examination of the program to determine its size and scope going forward, how it should be funded, or whether it should even exist."