Trump Team Embraces FCC Remake Blueprint

The incoming Trump Administration is said to have signed off on an approach to remaking the Federal Communications Commission offered by the FCC transition team.

The FCC would be restructured to better reflect the convergence of the digital age as a first step, and, eventually, move functions deemed "duplicative," like, say, competition and consumer protection, to other agencies, particularly the Federal Trade Commission. Jeff Eisenach and Rosyln Layton have argued that what remains would be "a more coherent and streamlined " agency that "would more effectively serve the goals of consumers, competitors, and Congress."

The plan may dovetail with comments from Eisenach and Layton to Congress in 2014 as AEI scholars. Their two main conclusions were that 1) "the historical silo-based approach to communications regulation is inapposite to the modern communications ecosystem” and 2) the FCC functions are largely duplicative of those of other agencies. But it also takes a page or two from a regulatory reform proposal of former-FCC Chairman Bill Kennard back in the late 1990s