FCC

The Other Dumb Thing the FCC is Doing: New Rural Call Completion Rules

and |

"If every call was killing somebody that didn't go through, what would you do? Well, you wouldn't do what the FCC asked because the killing would go on," says telecom activist and architect Daniel Berninger.

When the Federal Communications Commission passed the Rural Call Completion (RCC) order in 2013, they hoped to prevent telephone companies from delaying or dropping expensive long-distance calls to rural areas by relying on customer-driven complaints to lead investigations.

However since rural phone customers rarely take complaints to the FCC, the agency orders all telephone companies to submit quarterly reports of completed calls to find dropped calls: and therein lies the problem. "There isn't enough information in the data for them to find problems," says Bernginger. "No one is evaluating exactly what [the FCC's] contribution is; their existence is justified by this theory that government would be useful here."

The Other Dumb Thing the FCC is Doing: New Rural Call Completion Rules is the latest video from Reason TV.

Watch above or click on the link below for video, full text, supporting links, downloadable versions, and more Reason TV clips.