The Present Direction of the FCC: An Appraisal
评估了美国联邦通信委员会（FCC）在放松管制方面的进展，指出通信行业因频谱使用和沉没成本特性，需要不同于交通业的政策，而里根政府后的FCC在促进竞争和新企业进入方面有所倒退。
Since at least the Ford Administration, deregulation has been a politically popular slogan. Over the past ten years there has been a growing recognition that dismantling the economic regulation of various sectorsairlines, trucking, communications, and the like-requires simultaneous or prior dismantling of the barriers to entry and competition. This recognition was translated into action during the Ford and Carter Administrations when the chairmen of the CAB, the ICC, and the FCC were trying to convince a majority of their fellow commissioners or board members (and the relevant members of Congress) to adopt promarket, deregulatory positions. During those periods, each agency made significant progress in opening up entry to new firms and new service offerings, and in reducing the degree of detailed intervention in the daily affairs of the regulated companies. Since the advent of the Reagan Administration, however, the momentum pushing open entry and promoting competition in communications has definitely been blunted, if not entirely broken. As a result, it may not be politically feasible to let the market, rather than the government, serve as the arbitor of the public interest in communications. Because of some basic differences between the industries, opening entry to communications markets requires different policy actions from those required to allow entry into most transportation sectors. Communications is characterized by two features not present in airlines and trucking: the use of the frequency spectrum and the market power of certain firms caused by the presence of a very significant proportion of sunk vs. variable costs. The use of the spectrum realistically means that government will determine basic entry possibilities into the foreseeable future by the way that it allocates spectrum, a process similar to making land zoning decisions. Having a high proportion of sunk vs. variable costs means that antitrust-type issues will remain important. While this latter condition is seen primarily as applying to common carrier communications at this time, the rapid growth and spread of cable television systems will make this condition applicable to broadcasting markets in the future. Given these features, further movement towards a truly promarket, deregulatory policy in communications requires that spectrum allocation decisions be made with the explicit goals of encouraging entry, increasing competition, and decreasing the market power of currently dominant firms. In particular, spectrum needs to be allocated in a way that assures that spectrum is always available to permit new service offerings in competition with those being offered over wire systems. In this respect, the Fowler FCC has deviated from its most recent predecessors. The Fowler Commission seems to be concerned more with removing some, but by no means all, restrictions on existing firms than with encouraging competition and new entry into the industry. It has not been willing to expand the ability of new firms to offer existing services, where competition could come about most rapidly. Rather, to the extent that it has considered allowing entry at all, it has focused its attention on creating new services that are either secondary to existing services, are structured so they can only supplement and not compete with existing services, or are able to compete only far in the future. Recent FCC activities illustrate these deficlencies.