An Open Letter to the FCC

An Open Letter to the FCC
medium.com

In the last year, regulatory decisions at the FCC, EPA, and DOE are being made by fiat, without any of the typical study and justification that typically goes into them. In particular, DOE suggestions to FERC have been denounced by nearly everybody in the energy industry, by nearly every interested outsider, and in a bipartisan fashion from lots of prior FERC commissioners. The general whims of a single person are taking precedence over having market principles, or really any other principle at all. The only parties in favor of the regulations at all are those who directly benefit by guaranteed payments, and they only justify their favor of the regulations through a massive and legally questionable expansion of regulatory power of the regulatory agency, something that these particular partisans are usually against.

With the FCC, we see something similar, an impulse to make regulations without much reasoning behind those regulations except that they favor a small group.

This type of regulation, where particular parties are favored, rather than particular principles, is madness.

There are 5 FCC commissioners but only 3 may be of the same party. Ajit Pai, Brendan Carr and Michael O'Rielly are locks to vote in favor, so it will pass, 3-2.

At this point the best thing people can do is prepare to vote in 2018 and 2020, whether that's registering voters or forming groups to get lazy liberals or independents to vote to send better people to Washington.

One side aspect that I think hasn't been covered: FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is a former Verizon lawyer and probably plans to parley his government experience into a lucrative gig at one of the big telcos once the Republicans are inevitably thrown out of office, so he stands to personally profit from this decision.

As Donald Trump would say, SAD.