The most revealing regulatory policy documents are often not those issued by the government itself, but those produced by its ideological enablers. The American Enterprise Institute, a well-funded Washington think tank that reliably champions free-market deregulation, recently published one such document: A paper by University of Florida economist Mark Jamison arguing that the Federal Communications Commission should be disbanded altogether. What appears to be a technocratic critique of “obsolete” regulation is better understood as something else entirely: The logical endpoint of a broader campaign in which major broadcasters, trade groups, and an array of curiously allied commentators are seeking to bend, hollow out, or erase the rules that constrain their power. The “Logic” Of Elimination At the heart of the AEI paper (Disbanding The Federal Communications Commission) is a simple claim: The FCC has “outlived the economic and technological conditions that justified its creation.” Monopoly telephony is said to be gone, spectrum scarcity obsolete, and broadcasting waved away as “no longer an industry” warranting sector-specific oversight. In an age of broadband abundance and digital convergence, the FCC’s core functions — common carrier regulation and broadcast licensing — are framed as anachronisms. Worse, the agency is portrayed as partisan, captured by politics rather than expertise, and therefore unworthy of continued existence. The proposed remedy is sweeping: Shutter the FCC, scatter its remaining functions across the federal government, and let markets govern communications instead. It is a clean, confident argument — and a deeply flawed one, not only economically but institutionally and democratically. The Presumption Of Deregulation The proposal becomes far less abstract when viewed against what is actually happening in broadcast policy today. Nexstar has spent years pushing the limits of the 39 percent national television ownership cap — and is now seeking to blow past it entirely with its proposed $6.2 billion acquisition of Tegna, which would require either regulatory waivers or a reinterpretation of existing law. If completed, the deal would give a single company stations reaching roughly 80 percent of U.S. television households. Nexstar contends that, using the FCC’s long-controversial “UHF discount” — an accounting fiction that cuts the reach of UHF stations in half despite the digital transition having erased their technical disadvantage — the combined company would reach “only” 54 percent of households, still well above the statutory limit. Either way, the transaction plainly relies on the FCC waiving or dismantling one of the last meaningful structural safeguards against excessive television consolidation. Even before this proposed merger, the Commission fined Nexstar and its sidecar partner, Mission Broadcasting, for using nominally independent shell companies to exercise de facto control over stations and evade ownership limits, ultimately forcing divestitures. The enforcement action documented just how easily paper “independence” can be weaponized to defeat the rules in practice. Public-interest groups now warn that approving the Nexstar–Tegna merger would further normalize treating statutory ownership caps as optional guidelines rather than binding law. Seen in that context, AEI’s call to abolish the FCC reads less like a radical outlier and more like the bluntest articulation of a logic already at work — one that, in more polite settings, steadily converts hard regulatory guardrails into soft suggestions. |
