WASHINGTON-Just as the wireless industry is changing, the regulatory process is changing from a rule-making process to one dominated by lobbying, a regulatory staffer said last week.
“I think we have been seeing a very fundamental change in that process … It is really not enough to submit comments and reply comments. Increasingly, what you have to do-and what we see-is that parties are presenting their views through lobbying presentations,” said Kris Ann Montieth, chief of the policy division of the FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau.
This process often can be frustrating, even to top lobbyists. Speaking on a panel at last week’s Frost and Sullivan Wireless Communications conference, Montieth participated in a session on the current regulatory environment with two lobbyists and found herself defending the actions of the agency.
“The [Federal Communications Commission] has a difficult time understanding the role of regulation in a competitive environment. Oftentimes regulators are predisposed to their way of thinking in terms of how best to provide telecommunications services to the public … We see a lot of the regulation coming out of the FCC today being geared toward consumers and a number of these regulations are designed to second-guess what a competitive market would provide with respect to telecommunications services,” said Brian Fontes, senior vice president for policy and administration at the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association.
Montieth said the FCC’s core mission is to make communications available at a reasonable cost to all Americans. She said this is at the heart of every decision. “We try to balance the interests of all of the groups that come before us asking us to act on a particular matter.”
How the FCC should or should not regulate is often a philosophical debate, said Rob Hoggarth, senior vice president of the Personal Communications Industry Association.
“Fundamentally, what are we talking about? It is almost philosophical … What is the political philosophy you have about telecommunications regulation? … There are going to be times when the industry is going to say we need regulation; We need you to help keep the states in line; We need you to help ensure that there is some measure of competition. But I think the general philosophy is that less regulation is better,” said Hoggarth.
Montieth said she does not think regulatory staffers have enough time to make the right decision-a switch from when she worked in private practice.
“I used to think that the FCC moved exceedingly slow … but being on the inside I oftentimes think we move exceedingly fast. I sometimes feel like I don’t have the luxury of making decisions with all of the facts before me, all the information I need … So while we might take a long time in making a decision, I think we feel very strongly that we want to get it right. We want to make the right decision and at our core we need to keep in mind the American consumers,” said Montieth.
The process of lobbying for or against a particular regulation gets even more difficult when Congress gets involved, Fontes said.
“In the context of knowing what is best for consumers, we will often have a situation where the industry, the FCC and Congress all seem to be working in different directions,” Fontes said.
