5/06 IEEE Spectrum Critique of FCC/Getting the Quality of Government You Deserve

The May issue of IEEE Spectrum, the flagship magazine of the (mainly US) electrical engineering society, has a rather blunt article critical of FCC policies which closes with a shot at FCC and Chairman Martin:

• Of the four sitting commissioners on the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, two were trained as lawyers and two as historians. Of the seven members of France's ARCEP, however, three are graduates of the Ecole Polytechnique—France's near-est equivalent of MIT or Caltech—and a fourth has taught there.
• Without belittling the impressive credentials of the FCC chairman, Kevin Martin, ARCEP Chairman Paul Champsaur arguably has more relevant qualifications, having run one of France's top research organizations. Other ARCEP members include a president of a college of mechanical and energy engineering; an "engineer in chief" of telecommunications; a general engineer in telecommunications; and a doctor of mathematics and economic sciences.

There is some truth to what it said. Indeed here are links for the bios of the current FCC commissioners:

• Chmn. Martin
• Comm. Copps
• Comm. Adelstein
• Comm. Tate
• Comm. McDowell
  

But the FCC has a very wide jurisdiction ranging from telephone rates (with rural telephone rates being a major social and political issue), broadcast station ownership, broadcast content, e.g. indecency, some Internet issues, CATV, and spectrum issues. In the best of all worlds one could not expect most commissioners to be card carrying IEEE members with this portfolio of issues before the commission.

More telling is the fact that the commissioners have consistently failed to chose for their personal staff of 3 assistants, analogous to judges' clerks, any people with a specific background for technical communications policy issues. This can be seen from the staff biographies of the current commissioners:

• Chmn. Martin's staff
• Comm. Copps' staff
• Comm. Adelstein's staff
  
• Comm. Tate's staff
• Comm. McDowell's staff
  

Do you have to have a EE degree to do good technical policy work? No. Over the years the FCC commissioners have had a few outstanding lawyers on their staff with no formal technical background who had a great feel for technical issues. (Elliot Maxwell, Ken Robinson, and Dave Siddall come to mind.) But the overwhelming majority of the commissioners' assistants tasked with technical policy issues over the past 25 years have had no background in the area and never developed any insight into the technical issues. Remember, these people don't have to design radios or Internet systems, but they do have to ask the right questions and check whether the answers make any sense.

I am not advocating that some of these jobs be reserved for "card carrying IEEE members", something that the Society of Broadcast Engineers has sometimes advocated in the past. Indeed, many mainstream engineers lack the ability to integrate technical issues with policy, societal, and political issues - things not taught much in normal engineering curriculum. But given that Silicon Valley is a big force in today's economy, it seems strange that no FCC commissioner has ever hired as an assistant anyone with Silicon Valley experience.

But the real problem isn't the FCC commissioners. Abraham Lincoln once said, "People generally get the quality of government they deserve." The US high tech industry and its .com millionaires and billionaires participate actively in the political process but appear to accept this performance from the FCC. With the exception of Intel which appeared to promote a well qualified senior staffer for an FCC commissioner appointment last year, there are no signs that Silicon Valley is telling Washington that it wants an FCC that understands the high tech part of its jurisdiction and, at the very least, wants commissioners to have one staffer with some background or experience in the high tech industry.

"It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness"

What can reasonably be done? People have to speak up in responsible ways. Particularly people who make political donations.

1. Urge the White House and future presidential candidates to consider as FCC nominees some people with real high tech industry experience.
2. Urge representatives and senators to bring up at FCC oversight hearings the issue of commissioners' staff experience in technical policy areas.
3. Urge senators to raise the issue at confirmation hearings for commissioners as this is the time when commissioners are most receptive to ideas. Nominee Robert M. McDowell has yet to be confirmed and Chairman Martin was recently renominated so these hearings might be good places to raise the issue.
4. Urge IEEE and IEEE/USA leadership to make this a real issue for IEEE.
5. Similarly, the high tech trade associations such as TIA and AEA should make this general reform part of their agendas also.
   

FCC Website: The good, the bad, and the ugly

The FCC management is very proud of its website, it has even won some awards. But is the current FCC website really an effective communications tool with the public or is it a dumping ground for information and ocassional misinformation?

The FCC website has its roots in the mid 1980s "Mrs. Field's cookie" scandal at FCC. At that time the FCC docket files - a key part of policy development containing FCC proposals and comments from the public - were kept in a public reading room on the 2nd floor of 1919 M St., NW in large red and blue binders. The main users of these files, other than FCC staffers writing policy decisons, were paralegals from law firms who researched the filings for their bosses and made copies, as necessary, to take back to the office. The binders were kept "behind the counter" and one had to ask a clerk for them each day. Allegations were made at a congressional hearing that the file clerks were favoring certain law firms and paralegals in making the files available and that Mrs. Field's cookies, a new and expensive brand at the time, was the preferred currency for paralegals wanting better service. (I personally have no knowledge whether this was correct or not, but once it was said at a hearing it didn't really matter.) This allegation caused great embarassment to Chairman Fowler who ordered a crash project with little or no cost constraints to "solve the problem". The solution chosen was a dedicated digital imaging systems with multiple terminals on the same desks in the public reading room where paralegals had been looking at the red and blue folders. Incoming comments would be scanned into the imaging systems which would then provide access to, perhaps, 30 terminals.

8-10 years later when FCC jumped on the Information Highway the same basic system, now known as the Electronic Comment Fling System (ECFS), was linked to the Internet with little or no design change. It was designed for paralegals who were told what to look for and now tries to serve the public. Even though most documents are written on computer systems and available in machine readable form, the system allows submissions in either machine readable .pdf and .doc files or scanned/photographic .pdf files. The only indexing is a listing of comments by filing date. Attempts to search by filing organization/name are unreliable since the name might be repsented different ways. (For example, in Docket 04-186 the Association for Maximum Service Television, a key trade group, is identified in the index as "MSTV, Inc." in some places and "Maximum Service Television, Inc." in others making it difficult to find all their filings quickly. It is unclear whether such differences result from actions of FCC clerks or the inconsistency by the filing party. Note, by contrast, that all persons holding FCC licenses have to get a unique FRN - FCC registration number - even if they only renew their single license once every 10 years.)

There are no tools that allow searches over a set of comments for key words, which would be difficult to implement since many of the comments are images that aren't machine readable. At the time of the initial implementation, a friedn who managed a parallel system in another agency told me that the FCC's plans were obsolete even then. Indeed, in ECFS there are scanned versions of FCC documents which are not machine readable, for example, while in another totally independent FCC system, EDOCS, one can find machine readable versions of FCC-originated documents, for example. There is no incentive for filing parties to make their documents machine readable and they may prefer to make them difficult to use in order to increase the burden on opposing parties filing reply comments under short deadlines.

But suppose you have trouble remembering the 5 digit docket number, what do you do? There are no general tools to help you as both ECFS and EDOCS just assume you know these magic numbers. One bright spot is on the Office of Engineering and Technology's website where there this a helpful summary page of all the office's dockets with information about filing dates, a short title, the docket number, and a direct link to ECFS. Unfortunately, this only applies to OET's dockets and there are not similar tools for the whole agency.

By contrast, the Department of Transportation has a has a link on its site that gives a list of all open dockets. Clicking on a docket of interest takes one directly to the docket file with the public comments. FDA has a similar list of open dockets although reaching the comments is not as easy as in the DOT case.

Ever notice how hard it is to find things in general on the FCC website? I believe that basic reason is lack of leadership in managing the website. The poor webmaster is pushed around by many high ranking people who all want their pet project to get top billing. as a result the web page is so cluttered that nothing is easy to find. I recently did a survey of some agency home pages, which is presented below with data of the number of words, characters, and links on the agency's top home page.

Agency #Words/#Characters/#Links (on top page of website)

Federal Communications Commission 845/5642/176
Treasury Department 416/2396/67
Department of Commerce 203/1277/44
Department of Interior 633/3466/97
Department of Transportation 216/1287/52
Nuclear Regulatory Commission 268/1551 /48
Securities and Exchange Commission 185 /1190/72
Enviromental Protection Agency 950/5227/124
White House 4 57/2342/67

No other federal regulatory commisson clutters its top page with names and links for each of its commissoners. This lack of discipline then extends to everyone else wanting to clutter up the top page! One gets links to separate .doc and .pdf versions of statements of each commissioner on each major decision. Why links to .doc documents when other agencies excusively use .pdf? Probably it made sense 10 years ago and no one want to make a decison now. Do people really want to have to access each commission's statement separately? No, but no one wants to decide to group them.

Now the ugly part. For all this openness, some things are best not said. It appears that the Spectrum Policy Task Force was disestablished at some point about a year ago. Its link disappeared from the top page but is still there if you remember it. But clicking on this link creates more questions than answers.