#61: FCC Shenanigans and Deal-Breaking

Tech Policy Podcast

TechFreedom

Technology

4.8 • 45 Ratings

🗓️ 14 April 2016

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Before the last FCC monthly meeting, GOP Commissioners Pai and O’Rielly (previous guests of the show) struck a deal with Democrat Commissioner Mignon Clyburn on Lifeline. The Universal Service program subsidizes access to communications services for low-income Americans. This rare moment of bipartisanship at the politicized FCC would have extended Lifeline to cover broadband while capping its budget and rooting out fraud and abuse that have long plagued the program. At the 11th hour, Chairman Tom Wheeler pressured Commissioner Clyburn to renege on the deal and rammed through his own proposal on a 3-2 party line vote. What happened behind the scenes? Matthew Berry, Chief of Staff to Commissioner Pai, joins to show to discuss.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan Swarchstraver, your host. On today's show,
0:12.8	catching up with the FCC. Joining me in the studio is Matthew Berry, Chief of Staff to FCC Commissioner
0:19.7	Ajit Pye.
0:22.0	Matthew, thank you for joining me.
0:23.4	It's a pleasure to be here, Evan.
0:27.2	And as you know, we've had your boss, Commissioner Pye, on the show.
0:29.9	We've had your colleague, Commissioner O'Reilly.
0:34.4	Can you guarantee that by the end of this episode, you can deliver me the chairman as a guest?
0:37.3	You know, I can't make that guarantee, unfortunately.
0:38.4	Oh, man.
0:39.1	What a bummer.
0:40.6	Well, anyway, we'll get on with the show.
0:46.4	So in our first episode with Commissioner O'Reilly last week, we touched on this a little bit,
0:50.6	but today we're going to get into it a little bit more, the Lifeline program.
0:57.4	This is the Universal Service program that provides subsidies for landline telephone service for wireless service and it is also the source of the fees that Americans might
1:03.9	notice on their phone bills. And those fees then go to pay subsidies for people who are eligible
1:09.9	and who theoretically could not afford
1:12.5	telephone service otherwise. And recently, the FCC voted to extend this program to broadband
1:19.9	as an after effect of the reclassification of broadband as a telecommunications provider.
1:30.0	And that loosely defines net neutrality that we can get into on a separate episode. But what happened was,
1:37.3	as Politico referred to it as FCC intrigue, you had a deal with a Democrat commissioner,
1:43.6	and then that deal kind of blew up. So,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from TechFreedom, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of TechFreedom and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.