How the heck did the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) get into regulating the wireless industry (both licensed and unlicensed)? The FAA has proposed requiring pretty much any wireless service with an antenna to fill out a form for every antenna and antenna change. Right now, only services with big antennas (like broadcasters) near airports fill out FAA paperwork.
As the FCC gently points out in its own filing, the FAA does not seem to understand just how much this would increase paperwork for the industry — and for the FAA to process. Given that the FAA does not seem to have any reason to think that these antennas will cause rampant interference and bring planes out of the sky, maybe the FAA wants to rethink this?
Other industry groups, such as the National Association of Broadcasters, the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association, and various professionals have all stopped by to politely sugest to the FAA that, perhaps, the FAA HAS LOST ITS BLEEDIN’ MIND AND DOES NOT KNOW WHAT THE HECK IT IS TALKNG ABOUT.
What’s interesting for me is that this is yet another demonstration of how the various components of the Bush administration just don’t seem to ever speak to each other. During Katrina, the FCC outshone just about every other federal agency in the competence department. But as the FCC’s Katrina Report (and testimony from my friends in the wireless community who came down to help in the crisis) shows, there were huge problems getting the other government agencies to respect FCC authorized damage control teams and FCC licensed services. Meanwhile, we have the Patent and Trademark Office negotiating a major overhaul of broadcaster rights at a WIPO treaty, with apparently no involvement from the FCC or any other potentially impacted agency. The Chair of the Federal Trade Commission has announced it will set up its own task force on net neutrality — again without any apparent involvement of the FCC.
And that’s just the stuff in my own little corner of the world. Look around Washington these days and you see little effort by the Bush administration to require any kind of cooperation among the various agencies. We get overlap, paralysis and turf wars galore. But we don’t seem to be getting much done.
It’s not all bad, of course. Traditional relationships, like between the FCC and the National Telecommunications Information Administration (NTIA) appear to be working just fine. But something is seriously wrong when the FAA just decides to issue a notice about all antenna structures in the United States, and apparently does not even think about picking up the phone first and calling someone at the FCC and saying “Hi there, we’re thinking of doing a rulemaking on stuff that impacts industries you closely regulate; can we get together and chat first so we don’t horribly embarass ourselves?”
Stay tuned . . . . .