6 comments

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  Colin Samuels

  4 years ago

  Not only would this position "affect the basis for regulating 'indecency' on broadcast television and radio" but it would utterly devastate the already shaky reasoning behind Alaska Senator Ted Stevens' recent proposal to extend such regulations to cable and satellite programming. Whatever "scarcity" arguably exists in the broadcast spectrum certainly does not exist in the practically limitless cable and satellite realms. The opt-in nature of these newer channels should serve to defeat Stevens' and others' proposed regulation, but a change in the scarcity doctrine will ensure that defeat.
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  garym

  4 years ago

  My immediate thought is the opposite of Colin Samuels'; that the FCC is moving away from the bandwidth scarcity doctrine in order to adopt rationales that allow the government to censor cable and satellite broadcasts.
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  Colin Samuels

  4 years ago

  That may be the government's new position, but I think the FCC's is a reassessment of their traditional boundaries -- protection of the public trust in a scarce resource. The government's authority to regulate non-obscene communications must be grounded in something (here, dispensing access to and regulating a scarce public resource) to escape the Constitutional strictures of First Amendment doctrine. In other words, neither Congress' legislative grant to an administrative agency like the FCC or the FCC's exercise of its administrative rule-making authority can convey or assume restrictive power over speech contrary to that allowed by Constitution. I think garym's concern is a valid one, as it reflects the current political climate, but largely-settled judicial doctrines concerning speech protections would seem to be on the side of freedom, not restriction, if applied as-is.
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  Andrew McGuinness

  4 years ago

  Unfortunately, a government department's reaction to finding its doctrine is dead is more likely to be to find a new doctrine than to stop regulating.
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  Colin Samuels

  4 years ago

  The link to the paper has been moved to http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmat...
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  Michael

  3 years ago

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