Brookings

Thousands of local newspapers have closed in recent years. Their disappearance has left millions of Americans without a vital source of local news and deprived communities of an institution essential for exposing wrongdoing and encouraging civic engagement.

Too often, the corporate response to regulation has not been “what’s best for all stakeholders,” but “what’s best for the CFO (Chief Financial Officer).” The lobbying refrain sounds like this: “because regulation could hurt profits, it will hurt our ability to invest and innovate and therefore hurt the public interest.” You hear this from Big Pharma’s television ads. Broadband networks used the argument to kill net neutrality.

A year ago, the Trump Federal Communications Commission announced a proposal to reallocate C-band spectrum for 5G. With much fanfare, the FCC trumpeted a plan to outsource to the satellite companies the process of auctioning these airwaves. Rather than the kind of open and transparent auction process the agency has followed since the first spectrum auction in 1994, the Trump FCC declared it would be “faster” to embrace what they called a “marketplace approach” in which the licensees took over the job traditionally done by the FCC.