Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr says the agency has identified 40 rules and regulations for elimination as part of his broader reform initiative.
The 40 rules will be voted on during the FCC’s open meeting later this month. The specific rules have not been identified, but they span more than 17 pages and over 7,600 words, Carr said in a statement this week.
“It’s hard to believe we still have regulations for telegraph, rabbit-ear broadcast receivers, and phone booths on our books,” Carr said. “Starting this month, that will change.”
The rules are part of the initial phases of regulatory reform under Carr’s “Delete, Delete, Delete” initiative announced earlier this year. Other rules and regulations are expected to be identified for modification or elimination in the coming months.
The initiative is part of a broader goal set forth by President Donald Trump earlier this year to reform government agencies with a focus on streamlining operations, lowering expenses and cutting waste.
At the FCC, all rules and regulations are candidates for reform or elimination, Carr said earlier this year. Broadcasters, telecommunications operators, space-focused companies, wireless providers and public interest groups are among those that have weighed in with their own Christmas lists of what should go and what should be kept.
Carr said tenure is not a factor in deciding whether to keep or eliminate a rule. During a speech on Wednesday, the chairman affirmed that “just because a regulation has been on the books for 30 years, we are not going to keep it there simply out of a sense of inertia.”
“We are going to focus on outcomes, rather than process to nowhere,” Carr promised. “We are going to have a bias towards action. After all, delay has an unappreciated economic and social cost. We are going to push for simple, clear rules, rather than complex and bespoke frameworks.”
The National Association of Broadcasters has put forward its own wish list of regulatory reform, which includes a sunsetting of the ATSC 1.0 broadcast TV standard in favor of NextGen TV and the elimination of caps that effectively limit how many radio and TV stations an individual broadcaster may own outright.
