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MEDIA ADVISORY                                  February 7, 2013

 

Contact: Randolph May at 202-285-9926

 

 

FSF's Randolph May Applauds Introduction of Sunshine Act Reform Bill

 
Free State Foundation President Randolph May issued the following statement concerning the bill reintroduced in Congress yesterday to reform the Sunshine Act as it applies to the FCC

 

"As a very longstanding advocate of reforming the Sunshine Act, and one who has written often about the need to change it, I applaud the introduction of the proposed "FCC Collaboration Act" by Reps. Eshoo, Shimkus, and Doyle, and Senators Heller and Klobuchar. And I am pleased the bill has bipartisan sponsorship.

 

By allowing more than two of the five FCC members to meet together to discuss agency business, the bill, if adopted, would facilitate more collaboration and a franker exchange of views among the FCC commissioners. And it would also enable the Commission to accomplish its work more efficiently because the exchange of views can take place directly, rather than through a series of one-on-one "round robin" discussions or through various staff intermediaries shuttling between the commissioners' offices. The current Sunshine Act restrictions are fundamentally at odds with the very rationale for the establishment of multi-member commissions and with notions concerning how they can most effectively function.

 

While I applaud the reintroduction of the bill, I do wish to state my preference would be for the Sunshine Act reform to be incorporated into a bill encompassing a broader range of necessary reforms. Indeed, the "FCC Reform Act of 2011," which contained a number of other desirable FCC process reforms, such as cost-benefit analysis requirements and shot clocks, included the same Sunshine Act proposal now introduced separately. I testified last year at a hearing on the "FCC Reform Act" and supported adoption of many of its provisions. And the House of Representatives ultimately adopted the bill.

 

So, while I support adoption of the FCC Collaboration Act, I'd like to see it adopted in conjunction with some other process reforms that warrant bipartisan support as well."

 

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Randolph J. May, President of the Free State Foundation, is a former FCC Associate General Counsel and a former Chairman of the American Bar Association's Section of Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice. Mr. May is a public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States, and in 1995, he chaired a special committee of ACUS that examined reforming the Sunshine Act. His article in the Administrative Law Review explaining the committee's reform recommendations is here.

 

Mr. May is a nationally recognized expert in communications law, Internet law and policy, and administrative law and regulatory practice. He is the author of more than 150 scholarly articles and essays on communications law and policy, administrative law, and constitutional law. Most recently, Mr. May is the editor of the new book, "Communications Law and Policy in the Digital Age: The Next Five Years." He is the author of A Call for a Radical New Communications Policy: Proposals for Free Market Reform, and he is the editor of the book, New Directions in Communications Policy, and he is co-editor of other two books on communications law and policy: Net Neutrality or Net Neutering: Should Broadband Internet Services Be Regulated? and Communications Deregulation and FCC Reform. 

    

The Free State Foundation is a non-profit, independent Section 501(c)(3) free market-oriented think tank.

   
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