I’m sure nobody is surprised that businesses regulated by the FCC responded with long lists of regulations that should be eliminated after the FCC invited them to do so in the Delete, Delete, Delete proceeding. Seemingly every trade association has an existing list of hated regulations, and the FCC heard from telcos, cable companies, cellular carriers, programmers, satellite companies, and even more obscure parts of the industry like prison phone providers and robocallers.

Some of the requests were fully anticipated and had been mentioned in the Delete, Delete, Delete docket. For example, AT&T and Verizon asked the FCC to eliminate most of the rules related to maintaining or reporting on copper telephone networks. The companies are tearing down those networks and would like to finish the task without paperwork or having to notify the public.

The purpose of the Delete, Delete, Delete docket is to eliminate rules that are antiquated and no longer needed. Trade groups took this as an opportunity to ask the FCC to eliminate regulations across the board, including regulatory rules that were explicitly ordered by Congress or rules recently adopted by the FCC. For example, there were multiple requests from ISPs to eliminate broadband labels, which just went into effect last year. Prison phone companies asked to overturn a recent FCC order that reduced prison calling rates. Verizon asked the FCC to reverse a recent decision that requires it to unlock phones so that customers can more easily change carriers. AT&T asked the FCC to eliminate its authority to issue fines after the company was recently fined.

One of the more interesting requests came from debt collection agencies and those who represent robocallers. They want to get rid of the rules that let the public easily opt out of receiving robocalls or texts. This doesn’t seem likely since the FCC is still actively working to eliminate junk and spam calls.

It is going to be very interesting to see what the FCC does with the huge pile of requests they received. I don’t know if anybody has added up the industry requests, but it wouldn’t be surprising if there are 10,000 specific regulations somebody wants to kill. The normal process in the past to add or delete regulations has been to issue a list of the specific changes being considered to get industry feedback. I assume that FCC staff will have to somehow wade through the huge list of requests to find those that meet the spirit of Delete, Delete, Delete. A lot of what is being suggested by the various industries are changes to active regulations that are not obsolete.

This is going to be a test of how activist the new FCC is going to be. If the Commission sticks to the stated purpose of eliminating unneeded regulations, this docket will not likely cause a ripple in the industry. I think everybody agrees that federal regulators should periodically eliminate outdated regulations.

However, the FCC could use this docket as a short-cut way to eliminate piles of active regulations. If that happens, it seems likely we’ll see scads of lawsuits challenging the FCC for not following the prescribed process for making regulatory changes. Interestingly, some recent court orders question the authority of regulatory agencies like the FCC to add new regulations that were not directly by Congress, and it seems to me that this same concept would apply to eliminating regulations.