In Zero Retries 0016, Steve, N8GNJ writes:
We May Soon Have a Fully Empowered FCC
Those of us watching the FCC for other than Amateur Radio purposes have been puzzled by President Biden’s seeming indifference to date that a lot of activity at the FCC is stalled because there are only four FCC commissioners (two appointed by Democrats, two appointed by Republicans) and that often results in a stalemate.
The wait for President Biden to weigh in on staffing up the FCC is finally over:
- Acting Chairperson Jessica Rosenworcel was nominated as Chairperson and was renominated for a new term (her original term had expired),
- Gigi Sohn was nominated for the vacant FCC Commissioner position,
- Alan Davidson was nominated for the Administrator / Assistant Secretary for for National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).
I won’t go into why these individuals are considered excellent picks (here’s a telecom-centric perspective from someone I respect), but it’s very encouraging to me that the FCC will soon be fully staffed and thus able to tackle issues that it’s been unable to work on without a full commission.
I feel that with this FCC “at full strength” and with these competent people in place, this is going to be about the best “moment” that U.S. amateur radio will have in the foreseeable future to accomplish rules reform, such as not specifying data rates. I hope the movers and shakers in U.S. amateur radio immediately begin working on advocating for amateur radio rules reform at the FCC.
All that I have to add to this is that I hope that the folks at the ARRL are on top of this.
If you haven’t yet subscribed to Zero Retries, you might want to take a look. N8GNJ publishes an issue every week and covers a lot of very interesting topics. In addition to this item on the FCC, issue 0016 also covers new Raspberry Pis, Direworf improvements, packet radio, VARA, Dragon OS (a Linux distribution for amateur radio), and Kraken SDR.
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