Priorities Are Askew at the FCC

Computerworld - It must be tough being America's nanny, especially when there's so much real work to do.
Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and his feckless colleagues are on a roll these days. They're chasing so-called indecency from the airwaves with a zeal we haven't seen in decades, causing broadcasters to turn what's already a Pablum medium into even worse junk.
What does this have to do with the world of business and IT? Plenty -- the serious telecom issues on the FCC's plate need attention, and they're not getting enough of it.
There's been at least a tiny bit of progress on one key issue: whether Internet-based telephony, or VoIP, should be regulated, and if so, by whom. The FCC recently said that it alone should have regulatory authority in this arena.
That's a good idea. Many states have been eyeing VoIP in a variety of ways, especially as something they might tax. But if anything in today's communications world is an interstate system, it's the Internet. And VoIP is just one more bit of software using the Net.
Now, one could make an argument that Internet calls to or from phones served by fixed-line carriers should come under the authority of the state agencies that regulate the regional telephone monopolies. That would create chaos, however, in an industry that's just beginning to be a serious player on the telecom scene. It would create chaos for customers, too. Federal preemption makes sense in this case.
If only this nod to common sense was matched by other recent FCC moves. Susan Crawford, a cyberlaw and intellectual property specialist who teaches at Yeshiva University's Cardozo Law School in New York, recently spotted some remarkable language in an FCC legal brief.
The issue is related to the FCC's water-carrying for the copyright industry, which won a regulatory requirement that future digital video displays contain "broadcast flag" technology, a system in which a television will refuse to allow copying of digital content designated by the copyright owner.
Now, Crawford writes in her blog (http://scrawford.blogware.com/blog) that the FCC is saying this applies to any kind of digital device -- and that the law gives these unelected federal bureaucrats "regulatory power over all instrumentalities, facilities and apparatus 'associated with the overall circuit of messages sent and received' via all interstate radio and wire communication." Yikes.
We can blame Congress for some of this. It writes laws that let regulators assume wide authority.
But like the spate of airwave censorship cases, such regulatory overreaching is