GAO on FCC: Trampling on Sunshine . . .
posted by Frank Pasquale
and it doesn’t feel good. A new GAO report has criticized the FCC for permitting certain favored groups to get an “inside line” on upcoming commission action. Here’s my take on it, and here’s Ed Markey:
“When the corporate insiders and the K Street crowd have the inside track on decisions critical to telecommunications, media, broadband or wireless policy, then the public and consumers are at an inherent disadvantage,” [Ed] Markey said. Markey, who chairs the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, said such violations appear to be “a daily reality” at the FCC.
Interesting way of avoiding the Government in the Sunshine Act. Larry Lessig proposes an elegant solution:
[This] needs to become a bigger issue for the candidates in this election. Let’s hear a promise by the presidential candidates that they will only appoint FCC commissioners who promise not to work for those they have regulated for at least 5 years after their term is over. That would be real change.
The Lessig Wiki on corruption in general is a great resource. But one has to wonder, given the corporate campaign money at stake, can any candidate dare to push an idea like Lessig’s today?
October 5, 2007 at 9:39 pm
Posted in: Cyberlaw
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Responses (2)
SN - October 5, 2007 at 11:46 pm
Would such a promise need to come with a substantial pay raise for FCC commissioners? For anybody with the requisite skills and knowledge, a stint as an FCC commissioner is a tremendous pay cut. At the moment, though, their pay is effectively subsidized by private industry through the substantial premium they earn when they return to private life. (Obviously this is true across a broad range of government jobs, not just FCC commissioners!) A reform like this without a corresponding pay raise might cause many potential commissioners to think twice about the job.
(Of course, many economists would probably argue that the public is already being implicitly “taxed” for the difference by the transfer of surplus from the public to the private industries that benefit from these corrupt deals. But higher salaries mean higher taxes which are very visible, whereas corruption isn’t. and even when you point out the corruption, I think most Americans would miss the necessary link: they’d want to prohibit the corrupt behavior by fiat without realizing they also need to increase Commissioners’ pay, and then instead of being implicitly taxed through the social loss from corrupt policy, they might simply instead be implicitly taxed through the social loss from bad policy because candidates with the appropriate skill and experience decline to serve as Commissioners.)
Frank - October 6, 2007 at 2:56 pm
I’m in agreement that the salaries would likely need to be raised.
Here’s an interesting take on a tangentially related issue: negative salaries for some employees:
http://jamesdmiller.blogspot.com/2007/10/negative-salaries-for-supreme-court.html
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