Interesting catch-up on the FCC under Obama and chairman Julius Genachowski, on the Bloomberg wire.  Not so much a substantive view but a personnel summary — new, and out-of-the-mainstream appointees.

Genachowski’s FCC may be “the most curious regulatory commission in the history of regulatory commissions” as it fires off scores of official inquiries, said Jeffrey Eisenach, chairman of Empiris LLC, a Washington economics consulting firm.

“They are conducting, I think, the most complete review of communications policy in decades,” said Eisenach, who teaches college courses on regulated industries. “The potential for better policy is there. The potential for big mistakes is too.”

The FCC [Federal Communications Commission] “is charged with regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable. The FCC’s jurisdiction covers the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. possessions.”

Under Resident Bush the FCC busied itself with investigation of 10-second nipple appearances on TV and ensuring that the most violent, gun oriented shows had all the minutes they needed.  The so called “Fairness Doctrine” was also an FCC policy from 1949 until Ronald Regan’s FCC chair Mark Fowler revoked it in 1987, leading directly to the kind of vicious, unbalanced offerings on cable and over the air that have profoundly altered the national information ecology.

In other words the FCC has a lot to do with things that matter greatly to most of us; it controls the pipes, so to speak, of all information but over-the-fence gossip that reaches our ears.  So, it’s good to see that Genachowski is looking outside the box.  So far, reports on what is happening are favorable, particularly, insisting on the need for a national broadband plan [broadband is the generic term for the wired network which connects most of us to the Internet].  The US is far behind most of the rest of the developed world in widely available, high speed internet.   The new plan would bring 100 million households up to 100 Mbps access.  Many rural areas still have only dial-up access, which is about 50 kbs.  Forget about video.

The new FCC has also begun a review of how broadcasters (ABC, etc) and cable negotiate retransmission deals, and a renewed auction of a portion of the wireless spectrum for new technologies coming on line.  In October the FCC approved net neutrality, a much fought over issue over pricing, access and discrimination:

…subject to reasonable network management, a provider of broadband Internet access service may not:

1) prevent any of its users from sending or receiving the lawful content of the user’s choice over the Internet;

2) prevent any of its users from running the lawful applications or using the lawful services of the user’s choice;

3) prevent any of its users from connecting to and using on its network the user’s choice of lawful devices that do not harm the network;

4) deprive any of its users of the user’s entitlement to competition among network providers, application providers, service providers, and content providers.

5) A provider of broadband Internet access service must treat lawful content, applications, and services in a nondiscriminatory manner.

6) A provider of broadband Internet access service must disclose such information concerning network management and other practices as is reasonably required for users and content, application, and service providers to enjoy the protections specified in this rulemaking

The Wall Street Journal and “Intelligent Design” believer George Gilder hate [bringing a similarly bogus set of arguments] what the FCC is doing — which is a pretty good indicator that it’s doing just fine.