Feld and Hazlett Debate Public Interest Standard for TPI
Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld and Clemson University professor Thomas Hazlett disagreed on whether the FCC’s public interest standard should continue to exist during a Technology Policy Institute podcast released Thursday.
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Feld said the public interest standard has been “hijacked” by the current FCC, and efforts to restore the agency’s independence could prevent it from being used for undemocratic ends. “The biggest problem we see here is that the guardrails have fallen off, and we now have the public interest standard, but without the limitations that were intended to prevent it from being a tool of coercion,” he said.
Hazlett, a former FCC chief economist, said the standard should be reformed or abolished, noting that other types of media function without being subject to that sort of regulation. “What the FCC can do under the public interest standard is verboten in the majority of the media, and correctly so, in my opinion,” he said. It “gives unchecked power to political considerations.” But getting rid of the standard wouldn’t prevent FCC coercion, Feld said, as the agency was able to pressure Skydance and Paramount to make concessions using its merger review power rather than the public interest standard.
Feld also argued that it would be difficult to restore the FCC’s independence if the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the legal precedent that bars firing independent commissioners. However, it might be possible to use the agency's quorum requirements to require independent commissioners by applying them more aggressively, he said.
“You would want to, without a quorum, shut down the whole agency so that the industry starts screaming that they can’t get their license transfers done, they can’t get their toys certified for Christmas, they can’t get the things that they care about,” Feld said. “Maybe that would be a way to try to preserve some level of independence.”