TAC Back at Work, With Heavy Focus on Deregulation

The FCC Technological Advisory Council met for the first time Thursday under Chairman Ajit Pai, with a new focus on types of issues Pai has emphasized, including cutting regulation and broadband deployment. TAC was a favorite of then-FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, who chaired the group before he was a commissioner. Pai, meanwhile, is visiting Plains states (see 1706080041). Although some complained afterward of a possible tilt toward deregulation under the TAC, others defended its tack under Pai.

“There was a transition in Washington,” said Julius Knapp, chief of the Office of Engineering and Technology. Pai wrote TAC Chairman Dennis Roberson within a month of the start of his chairmanship, Knapp said. “Then we kind of spent a fair amount of time trying to develop the new work plans.” Knapp said he met with Pai in early May on the future of the TAC and on past reports. Recommendations from last year haven’t been forgotten, Knapp said: “We just need a little more time.”

TAC's future was considered in doubt in December, the last time it met (see 1612070059). Roberson said last month he met with Pai and TAC had his full support (see 1705040053). Council working groups started meetings before Thursday. As an example of how much things have changed, Roberson noted only one of the TAC working groups, on stolen smartphones, is a holdover.

Working group one is focused on eliminating technical regulations that could impede business. Co-Chair Russ Gyurek, in the Cisco chief technology office, said the focus can’t be on only what rules to cut. “We need to focus, too, on what detriment there could be and how to be fair,” he said. “If you do remove a regulation in the first half, you need to look at who the stakeholders are that you have affected. ... Make sure it's done fairly and equitably." One focus of the group is whether regulations should be approved with an automatic sunset. Maybe rules should be approved with, for example, a seven- or 14-year time frame, Gyurek said. Much technology is replaced every five-seven years, he said.

The FCC has a responsibility to review rules, often through the biennial review process, Knapp said. But the record that comes in often is incomplete, he said. “We’ll have a handful of comments that might come in and then along the way we may have ad hoc comments such as, ‘I wish you’d get rid of this rule.’”

“Are there places where there are industry standards that we should be pointing to rather than putting details into our rules?” Knapp asked. He noted that in the 3.5 GHz shared band, the FCC relied on industry consensus to develop part of the technical rules outside of the agency. That led to some 150 industry officials working together on rules it would have made no sense for the FCC to write on its own. “Are there other places where multistakeholder processes are a way that we don’t write everything into rules and there’s freedom to build the framework that enables services to get started?” Knapp asked.

A second working group is looking at technical issues raised by broadband deployment. A purpose is to support the FCC Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee (BDAC), said co-Chair Adam Drobot, OpenTechWorks chairman. “The other is to really take a broad look at the communications industry, look at the various technologies that are available and take a hard look at the rules and policies that may impede broadband deployment.”

Three sub-working groups will do much of the work, Drobot said. The first will look at the “hard problems” of serving rural, sparsely populated areas,” Drobot said. A second will look a technological road map to guide future investments, he said. A final subcommittee is reviewing critical policies and regulations, he said: “It’s in its early stages."

David Young, Verizon vice president-policy, chairs the regulation sub-working group. It's “focused on policies, laws and regulations at the federal, state, or local level that often were established purposes that have nothing to do with broadband, necessarily, but may be acting as impediments to broadband infrastructure deployment,” Young said.

Gyurek said addressing local regulations is difficult because they vary broadly. “Good luck,” he said. “We don’t want to duplicate what’s being done on BDAC itself, where they actually have representatives from local governments,” Young said. The FCC has urged BDAC to wrap up much of its work in October (see 1705240007). Local government representatives complained they're underrepresented (see 1706010054).

Michael Calabrese said as a member of another federal advisory group, the Commerce Spectrum Management Advisory Committee, he finds some TAC changes concerning. “TAC is required to operate as a nonpartisan, expert advisory group,” said the director of the Wireless Future Program at New America. “Although it is completely appropriate for the TAC’s agenda to reflect the chairman’s policy priorities, Chairman Pai would be wise to allow the group to pursue as well important issues of their choice that look out beyond the horizon of current policy disputes. ... TAC’s long-term work developing the concept of a harm claims threshold to reduce future interference disputes among spectrum holders is a great example.”

One reason the 3.5 GHz group worked well is “the FCC explicitly did not abdicate its authority to monitor progress, referee disputes and make final policy decisions,” Calabrese said. “Standards bodies can inform the process and conserve agency resources, but the FCC, with transparent and full input from stakeholders beyond the companies involved, must ultimately guide and decide the ultimate outcome in the public interest.”

"Every chair has had an opportunity to shape federal advisory committees that can be incubators of new ideas,” said Robert McDowell, at Cooley and Mobile Future. “Discussions coming out of advisory committees can serve as telltales indicating the future policy direction of the commission. It should come as no surprise to anyone that the work of the advisory committees under Ajit will bear his philosophical fingerprints, just as they have for his predecessors." Wheeler declined to comment.

"Underbrush can be cleared and well-balanced TAC representation can help guide that process fairly,” said Doug Brake, senior telecom policy analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. “There are also certainly opportunities for better leveraging of multistakeholder organizations," he said. "TAC's strengths would be better served by focusing on specific proposals or the policy implications of particular anticipated technological shifts, rather than open-ended reviews of the” Code of Federal Regulations.