AMERICAS'S OTHER SPACE AGENCY: HOW THE FCC WENT FROM REGULATING TELEGRAPHS TO REGULATING SATELLITES.

• Author: Alexander, Payton

THE FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS Commission (FCC) has transformed significantly since its birth, taking on new powers and responsibilities as technology evolves. But one thing long remained the same: the agency's New Deal-era official seal, virtually unchanged since the FCC was established in 1934. The seal featured bright red characters spelling the commission's name on a field of blue, while a bald eagle flew over telegraph lines in the center, clutching lightning bolts in its claws.

In 2020, the FCC announced an internal contest to design a new seal. The winner, submitted by the branding strategy consultant Umasankar Arumugam, included a new element right in the center: Emblazoned atop a shield clutched by an eagle, a tiny satellite hangs in the starry sky.

The change was symbolic, but it reflected something profound. The FCC--born in the age of telegrams, telephoner switchboards, and families gathered around living-room radios--was now. a regulator at the center of the commercial space renaissance. As the agency observed when it announced the change, the new seal depicts the "communications technologies currently transforming our World." The FCC's history shows that commercial enterprises and market mechanisms are best positioned to drive such innovations. If advocacy groups, industry, or other parties want the space industry to fulfill its potential to "transform our world," they should look to telecommunications law.

A TELEGRAPH-AGE AGENCY IN A SPACE-AGE WORLD

IN 1934, CONGRESS passed the Communications Act, which created the FCC and directed it to "make available... to all the people of the United States...a rapid, efficient, Nation-wide, and world-wide wire and radio communication service with adequate facilities at reasonable charges."

The initial execution of this mission left much to be desired. For many years, the commission allocated spectrum by having "comparative hearings"--a cumbersome and somewhat subjective process in which competing applicants in a number of industries-would spend months or years trying to demonstrate why letting them use a particular frequency in a particular location would better "serve the public interest" than letting a competing applicant use that segment of the spectrum. These "beauty contests," as they came to be known, put the commission in the same impossible position as all other central planners. From their famed vantage point eight floors above Washington, the commissioners were charged with the nearly impossible task of anticipating what the future communications needs and desires of 300 million U.S. consumers might be.

In the 1980s, when cellular telephone service became commercially available, the agency effectively threw up its hands and' asked Congress for a new approach, and lawmakers, obliged. Instead of conducting comparative hearings, the FCC began to conduct geographic lotteries for spectrum rights. The commission's rules also effectively permitted new licensees to sell those use rights to other operators. The consequences were predictable: Applicants often entered the lotteries with no intention of providing...