Law360 Spotlights Ben Sperry’s Call to Overturn Outdated FCC
In a recent article, Law360 spotlights a Truth on the Market post by ICLE Senior Scholar, Innovation Policy, Ben Sperry. The piece explains why two landmark Supreme Court cases that grant the Federal Communications Commission authority over broadcast speech, Red Lion and Pacifica, are based on outdated technological reasoning and should be overturned.
An International Center for Law & Economics scholar, in a blog post earlier this week, described the two landmark cases — Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC and FCC v. Pacifica Foundation — as “indefensible and economically nonsensical” in the media market of 2025.
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Red Lion and Pacifica were crucial to upholding the public interest standard, but ICLE says the cases handed the FCC the power to regulate broadcast speech “in ways that would never be tolerated” in other forms of media today.
“This bizarre notion that radio and television broadcasters deserve fewer First Amendment protections than newspapers, websites or cable networks is a vestige of mid-20th-century technological reasoning that has long overstayed its constitutional welcome,” wrote Ben Sperry, ICLE senior scholar.
The full article can be read here.