FCC on the Verge of Going in a New Direction : After 12 Years of Less-Is-More Philosophy, New Chief Is Expected to Shake Up Agency
Four years ago, the Federal Communications Commission made the great leap forward: It junked its rotary phones. The agency charged with presiding over a revolution in information technology finally got touch-tone dialing.
Most everyone agrees that there really is a revolution going on in information technology. But what should the revolution look like? Who should own it? Where will it take us?
Those questions depend to a large extent on a single, not very advanced federal agency that, just as it did at the dawn of the television age, finds itself at the crossroads of new technology.
For 12 years, the FCC’s policy toward regulation was: Less is more. But now the agency is about to get an activist chief, Antoinette Cook, and perhaps a whole new direction.
Cook would be the first African-American and the first woman to head the FCC. But she is no newcomer to telecommunications, or to influence. She’s now senior counsel for the Senate communications subcommittee. Her stepfather is President Clinton’s transition director, Vernon E. Jordan, and her mother, Ann Dibble Jordan, serves on the board of Capital Cities/ABC Inc., a major corporate player in the communications industry.
Because of those connections, Cook might have to abstain from voting on some communications issues. In any case, she and her four fellow commissioners would face a full and far-reaching agenda in which not just billions of dollars, but entire industries, are at stake.
The FCC’s to-do list includes:
* Selecting a standard for high-definition television--a long-awaited technology that will vastly improve the quality of TV images and, potentially, create 100,000 manufacturing jobs in the United States.
* Approving a far-reaching technology called “personal communications services.” PCS will offer wireless telephone and computer communications through devices that may eventually be as small as a wristwatch. (The FCC has already authorized some specialized mobile radio operators to launch a wireless phone service this summer that will compete with cellular.)
* Weighing whether to let broadcasters offer compact disc-quality sound through digital radio. Last year, the agency proposed allocating airwaves for digital radio services broadcast via satellites.
* Allowing more competition in the local telephone market by granting phone competitors, such as cable operators, equal access to crucial telephone switching equipment. That is expected to encourage Congress to abolish laws barring phone companies from going into other communications fields, especially the lucrative cable television business.
Congressional aides and industry sources say Clinton’s selection of Antoinette Dibble Cook is imminent. The selection process has been protracted because the White House apparently would like to fill, simultaneously, a Republican opening on the five-member agency as well.
New leadership at the FCC would pave the way for the agency to focus more intently on regulating an advanced new era of communications, in which TV boasts interactive channels and telephones are as versatile as computers. Given the pace--and economic impact--of change, an awful lot is riding on the FCC’s ability to wisely govern the $300-billion telecommunications industry, which already employs 1 million people.
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How aggressively the agency should intercede in the telecommunications marketplace and how it goes about allocating such scarce resources as the airwaves is the subject of heated debate.
But there is little disagreement that the FCC--which spent much of the last decade limiting its oversight of the fast-growing telecommunications industry--is being pressed to take a more active regulatory role at a time when it has been hobbled by budget constraints so severe that it can no longer afford to license broadcast engineers.
“The FCC has been under-resourced in the past . . . but this is a crucial time,” said former FCC Chairman Richard E. Wiley, who is now a Washington communications lawyer. “The technology revolution is not going to slow down.”
For now, however, the agency remains in transition after the Jan. 19 resignation of Chairman Alfred C. Sikes. Another Republican commissioner, Sherrie P. Marshall, is still in office but has not participated in most agency matters while she looks for a new job.
Cook, a pragmatic and well-liked 36-year-old, helped enact the controversial new law that re-regulates the cable TV industry. She would take over from interim FCC Chairman James H. Quello, a Democrat and former broadcaster who is a 19-year FCC veteran.
Cook has also been controversial, thanks mainly to an incident in 1988 when she accepted more than $500,000 to abandon her bid to contest the license of a Washington radio station.
At the time, the settlement was legal. But such deals later prompted the FCC to limit license-challenge payoffs to out-of-pocket expenses. The 1988 transaction isn’t expected to prove fatal to the nomination of Cook, who has said she wanted to operate the station and accepted payment only because she was pressured by FCC officials to reach a financial settlement.
Cook would join an agency that has worked under enormous administrative pressures caused, in part, by a long history of political infighting--where everyone from former President Ronald Reagan to Hollywood actor Alan Alda has been enlisted to buttonhole FCC commissioners on behalf of powerful interests, such as the Hollywood studios and the regional Bell telephone operating companies.
Just hours before FCC commissioners voted last week to cut monthly cable rates about 15%, for example, Edward J. Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat who chairs the powerful House subcommittee on telecommunications and finance, telephoned some commissioners to press for a much steeper rate cut.
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Similarly, after former FCC Chairman Mark S. Fowler threatened to dump the FCC’s financial-syndication rules in the early 1980s in order to keep the three television networks out of the multibillion-dollar television rerun business, Hollywood called on Reagan, who summoned Fowler to the White House for a chat that ended the effort to bury the rules.
“That was a good example of how money and politics runs the process,” Fowler said. “The ability of the agency to make a public interest determination was clouded by politics. And it’s still highly political at the FCC.”
He added: “The atmosphere has gotten so that we now have to depend on the courts” to do the job of federal agencies.
But Quello--who quickly made his mark as interim chairman by approving lower cable TV rates and brokering a deal with fellow commissioners that relaxed 20-year-old restrictions on the TV networks doing syndication deals--believes that the infighting will diminish with a Democrat heading the FCC.
“I’m a Democrat and both of the committee chairmen are Democrats,” Quello said, referring to the heads of the FCC’s congressional oversight committees. “That should eliminate a lot of the contention.”
Yet given her long career on Capitol Hill, some associates of Cook say she may find it tough trying to remain independent of meddlesome politicians.
The FCC, an independent agency created by Congress in 1934 to regulate electrical communications ranging from television to radio-controlled model airplanes, seems an unlikely political lightening rod.
Unlike many other federal agencies that make headlines mostly through their enforcement measures, the FCC’s 1,700 engineers, accountants, economists, lawyers and administrators carry out the work of approving new communications technology and regulating the 3 million users of the radio spectrum, mostly in obscurity. But the FCC’s work has far-reaching impact on American culture, scientific and economic affairs.
“Other than the transportation industry, communications today has probably become the most critical and important part of our economy,” said Richard M. Smith, an FCC veteran who is chief of the FCC’s field operations bureau. “But the explosion in technology has made our job more difficult.”
Indeed, the Field Operations Bureau--which helps the FCC combat illegal and unlicensed electronic communicators--has watched its staff shrink to 380 this year from 488 in 1948 and a peak of 512 in 1979. As a result, said Smith, about 19% of mobile radio operators today operate without FCC authorization because they don’t fear action by the agency.
