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The FCC’s Reign of Terror on Transaction Reviews

Excerpt

Now that the election is over, the Federal Communications Commission is returning to the important but painfully slow business of updating its spectrum management policies for the 21st century. That includes a process the agency started in September to formalize its dangerously unstructured role in reviewing mergers and other large transactions in the communications industry.

This followed growing concern about “mission creep” at the FCC, which, in deals such as those between Comcast and NBCUniversal, AT&T and T-Mobile USA, and Verizon Wireless and SpectrumCo, has repeatedly been caught with its thumb on the scales of what is supposed to be a balance between private markets and what the Communications Act refers to as the “public interest.”

Commission reviews of private transactions are only growing more common—and more problematic. The mobile revolution is severely testing the FCC’s increasingly anachronistic approach to assigning licenses for radio frequencies in the first place, putting pressure on carriers to use mergers and other secondary market deals to obtain the bandwidth needed to satisfy exploding customer demand.

While the Department of Justice reviews these transactions under antitrust law, the FCC has the final say on the transfer of any and all spectrum licenses. Increasingly, the agency is using that limited authority to restructure communications markets, beltway-style, elevating the appearance of increased competition over the substance of an increasingly dynamic, consumer-driven mobile market.

Given the very different speeds at which Silicon Valley and Washington operate, the expanding scope of FCC intervention is increasingly doing more harm than good.

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