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MEDIA ADVISORY               April 15, 2016

Contact: Randolph May at 202-285-9926



Free State Foundation's Randolph May's Reaction to the White House's Misguided Statement Supporting Video Navigation Device Mandates

"The White House action is troubling for several reasons. First, the pattern the Obama Administration is establishing of repeatedly intervening in FCC proceedings in such a high-profile way is serving to compromise the Commission's independence and undermines the expectation that it is an agency acting based on its supposed expertise rather than political considerations.

Second, the statement evidences a complete lack of understanding of how much the video marketplace has changed since 1996 in the direction of more consumer choice and competition. It's as if the White House deliberately put on blinders so as not to see how rapidly new independent online streaming services and devices are proliferating. The White House ignores the fact that in 2015 the FCC itself found that cable companies operate in presumptively competitive markets across the country.

Third, if the White House statement is any indication of what passes for meaningful economic analysis in this Administration - as opposed to political rhetoric - then we're in real trouble."
 
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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 current public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States, and a Fellow at the National Academy of Public Administration.
 
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 180 scholarly articles and essays on communications law and policy, administrative law, and constitutional law. Most recently, Mr. May is the co-author, with FSF Senior Fellow Seth Cooper, of the recently released The Constitutional Foundations of Intellectual Property and is the editor of the 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 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 free market-oriented think tank.

  
The Free State Foundation 
P. O. Box 60680 
Potomac, MD 20859 
Tel: 301-984-8253 
 
     
 
 


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