One FCC neutrality elephant: disabilities compliance

Sat Feb 28 18:06:43 UTC 2015

On 02/27/2015 03:12 PM, Mel Beckman wrote:
> Two pages? Read the news, man.

I'd rather read the actual regulations, from the source, in 47CFR§8.  
They're public.  The enforcement won't come from what the news said.

> You say you haven't read the actual R&O. Nobody in the public sector, 
> or even in Congress AFAIK, has read it. The Order's 300-plus pages 
> were never publicly released or openly debated.This is another "you 
> must pass it to see what's in it" debacle, without the luxury of 
> having any semblance of democratic process or transparency.
The R&O is not limited to just the text of the actual regulations.  The 
R&O will include the discussion and the rationale behind the adopted 
rules, along with quotes from those who commented on the action, and 
further language, including the derivation of the regulatory authority.  
The actual regulation, much shorter than the R&O, is already public, in 
47CFR§8.  The R&O is the 'what' plus the 'why,' 'how,' and 'when' 
whereas the new section in 47CFR is just the 'what.'  It takes a lot 
more time to get the 'why,' 'how,' and 'when' into shape for publication 
than it does to get the 'what' into shape for publication. The 
enforcement will come from the 'what.'

This is standard, normal, FCC procedure.  The NPRM was 99 pages, plus, 
with proposed rules of two pages.  The R&O is reported as being 300 
pages perhaps, with actual adopted rules of about 8 pages (depending 
upon the font used; I took the eCFR version of 47CFR§8 and printed it to 
PDF, and that PDF ran 8 pages).  This is not unusual, and is something 
I've seen many times.  The process is quite transparent, just with 
greater latency than many people like, and you do need to know where to 
look, although the FCC has made it a lot easier to find stuff than it 
was a few years back.  The statement from the FCC spokesperson doesn't 
quote a length; we'll see how long it will be.  I personally look 
forward to reading it; FCC R&O's tend to be better reading than the 
resulting sections in 47CFR, but when the EB knocks on your door they're 
going to hold you to 47CFR, not the establishing R&O.

This is a lot better than the days where you had to subscribe to a 
service, like Pike and Fischer's, to get even the Daily Digest, much 
less up to the day copies of the CFR, like we now can have.  The latency 
for Commission actions is typically on the order of months; the NPRM's 
date is May 15, 2014.

You can see more into this by looking at the docket's page at 
http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/proceeding/view?name=14-28 .  There were over 2 
million filings in this docket, with almost 7,000 in the last 30 days 
alone.  I would imagine the first place to have the actual R&O text will 
be the docket's page linked above; you can even follow it with its RSS 
feed and get it as soon as its released.