Michael Powell: FCC Needs to Get Out of Mergers and Into Giving Wireless Its Due

This asshole never met a merger he didn't like when he was chairman.

The FCC needs to be relieved of its merger review authority and made to understand that it needs to take wireless into account when it is looking at the competitive broadband market.

Those were some of the suggestions from National Cable and Telecommunications Association president and former FCC chairman Michael Powell at a Brookings Institution forum Tuesday in Washington.

Powell, who was on a panel entitled "Internet Everywhere: Broadband as a Catalyst for the Digital Economy," said he would not get the FCC out of the merger review business because it was not competent, but because it was duplicating the efforts of Justice and the FTC for "trivial gains compared with the cost of the exercise.

He pointed out that reviews of mergers in other sectors, like oil, gas or food, some of which he suggested were even more important that communications mergers, were not subject to a similar dual gauntlet.

He also suggested that the "dark side" of the FCC's merger review role was a sort of conditions "bazaar" created by the vague public interest standard.

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