FCC Transition Team's Mark Jamison: Do We Need an FCC?

In staffing his Federal Communications Commission transition team, President-elect Donald Trump has tapped a pair of American Enterprise Institute (AEI) veterans and free market de-regulators in Jeffrey Eisenach and Mark Jamison.

While it is tough to predict whether the merger-threatening populist Donald Trump (he has said he opposes AT&T-Time Warner and would unwind Comcast-NBCU) or the regulation-threatening Trump (he wants two regulations axed for each new one added) will set the tone for the FCC, the choice of the transition team leadership could be instructive. Eisenach and Jamison are linked at the communications deregulatory hip by AEI, a free market think tank. While Eisenach has gotten attention as a key overall transition team member for his deregulatory views, including on network neutrality, Jamison's appointment adds some new deregulatory punch. "Regulation is about disappointing people at a rate that they can endure," Jamison has written. But he is clearly out to "disappoint" people less. Jamison says most of the reasons for having an FCC have "gone away," in part because he says there are few telecom network monopolies, and ISPs are rarely among those few. That is quite the difference from the Wheeler FCC's emphasis on ISP gatekeepers to justify various regulatory approaches, including net neutrality and broadband privacy rules, both of which are likely to get a second look under a Republican chair.